#stainalive

[uispeccoll]

Bae: What did you do today?

Me: Oh, you know, just some multispectral imaging of medieval manuscripts.

Thanks to the CLIR/Mellon team for their work imaging stains and palimpsests in our medieval manuscripts! 

Multispectral imaging can uncover hidden writing and other kinds of evidence of the history and past life of a manuscript that are not visible to the naked eye. 

[upennmanuscripts]

The Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture’s Postdoctoral Fellow Heather Wacha and two colleagues – Dr. Erin Connelly (University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center) and Dr. Alberto Campagnolo (Library of Congress) – have recently received a CLIR/Mellon grant to undertake a project that will create a “Library of Stains” for scholars, librarians and conservators.

If you have ever spilled coffee or left a stain on a book you were reading, then you will understand how accidental human interventions leave all sorts of traces in and on books. Medieval people were no different; they too accidentally left stains on their reading material. Historians of the book often see stains as inconveniences at best, and tragedies at worst. The Library of Stains project will examine a variety of stains found on parchment, paper, and bindings from medieval manuscripts, focusing only on “dirty” old books in order to gather scientific data that will provide clues as to how previous generations used and stored their reading material.    The data will provide a new approach for learning about the history of the book, the materiality of books and book conservation.

More...

[upennmanuscripts]

‘A Boke of Practyk:’ Stains of Medicine and Alchemy

Many of the most interesting manuscript stains are found in the bindings and folios of soiled, heavily-used medical and alchemical texts. The Middle English quote in the title of this post comes fr…

A new blog by CLIR Post-Docs Erin Connelly (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies), Heather Wacha (University of Wisconsin), and Alberto Campagnolo (Library of Congress), studying the science of manuscript stains. Check out the latest post on stains in medical and alchemical manuscripts!

[idealmanltd]

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[idealmanltd]

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