ASMR at the museum | Turning the pages of a medieval choirbook | V&A

So today I'm looking at this 15th century choir book in preparation for a display called Fragmented Illuminations, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. So all of these are chants, so the pages would have literally sung. So this is the first leaf of the book. So we're at the Feast of the Assumption here, and so we see the Virgin going up into heaven, and then the apostles are all gathered at her tomb, her empty So this is an initial A for Assumpta est Maria, so it's hard to remember that this is actually a letter, especially since the artist has done without the horizontal stroke, there's a little interrupted stroke there coming out on the right, but it's not quite enough to make an A, and those masks are characteristic of the work of the Dalibri family, both Francesco and his son Gironamo Dalibri, they often use these colors as well for the decoration in the books that they that they have made, and there's extra decoration going on in the border with those gold bowls and some pen work that is drawn around the gold bowls. And then in the bottom border we've got again the head of a man that looks very much like the two faces in the initial, and he's made of foliage, so he's like a green man, except he's blue and purple and green and pink, and the nuances are absolutely beautiful in this face, and just in the way the blue goes into pink and purple in the foliage here, it's very fine. And then we've got pagination, or rather foliation, so these you see that the numbers are written on the front of each page, but not on the back, so actually what we would call pages would be one, two, but here we've got one and two, and that's because that's how foliation works, you number the leaf rather than the side of the leaf, and so this is folio one, recto and verso, this is folio two, recto and two, verso, and so on. So here there's something strange happening, it looks like the edge is burnt, and it's very localized, it's only on a few pages, folio eight has that same burnt edge, and then here there's some just black marks, but it's not actually fully burnt, and that might have been caused by a candle, because that's what they would have been using beside those books. It's really localized, this is an attempt at mending a hole, so we can see the little prick holes on either side, that would have been where the thread was going through, so in order to close this hole, when they prepared the parchment, there was this defect in the parchment, in the skin, and to repair it they just sewed it together, and that's what we have here, the thread has disappeared, but we still see the little scar that is left by it. In terms of the preparation of the parchment, this came from the skin of an animal, and in order to make parchment, you need to to steep the skin into a solution, until the hair is detached. There's a lot of scraping involved, and a lot of stretching on a large frame, in order to get it to this point, this thinness. This is actually quite thick, you can get parchment much thinner, but you need for your choir book to be sturdy, you need quite thick parchment. The parchment leaf would have a side that would have been against the flesh of the animal, and a side that would have been against where the hair was, so it's called the hair side and the flesh side, and often they have a slight variation in colour, and so when making these manuscripts, flesh side was made to face flesh side, and hair side was made to face hair side, and in some manuscripts it's more visible than others, that slight variation in the tone of the depending on which side you are of the parchment. It's not very obvious here, but it is a little, yeah, this side would have been the flesh side, I think, and it feels slightly different. In some manuscripts it's really obvious, and others not so much, and you can even see in some where the hair was, like you have little little black dots on the parchment. It's so much darker here than over there, it's even like and so the initial that we see here is not a virgin and child, but actually the Virgin is the little child in her mother's arms, so this is Saint Anne and the Virgin, and they're shown in a lovely little interior, a bedroom with the bed at the back, and there's a small basket with some linen on the left, so lovely details here, and it's an initial N for Nativitas, and we can see also that the scribe has played a little bit with the with the letter A here, there's some extra ornament that has been put in, like foliage, and this particular script is called Gothic script, and it's very regular, and it may be quite difficult to read often, because it's all these vertical, what they're called minims, so all these vertical strokes, but you can see where the nib would have been the width of each stroke, and how the scribe would play with the width of the nib, using the full width sometimes, and sometimes using just the edge in order to get something really thin, like the ending of that stroke, so this is Nativitas and then Gloria, and we've got some penwork initials here, so just with ink this time, simpler, and we can see the wear on the parchment here, just from so much touching, so much page turning, so here there's a whole section that has been deleted, scraped away, we can still see faintly the letters that were there, probably started Gloria, and nothing has been put in its stead, so the initial is left there on its own, but there's no more text that follows, unlike on other pages where the text hasn't actually been changed. Over time the liturgy changes, the chants that you need to sing for particular days change, and to reflect those changes the book needed to be adapted, so basically what they've done is that they've gone with a knife, and just scraped at the music and chants that went with the music, and have replaced them with others. Parchment is very sturdy, so we can take that, you can see really the post of the previous music that was there, and has been changed, all of the notation, it's as if it was jumping around, so here we can see how dramatic the changes to the text have been, because we've got an I that was needed instead of the original B, so it's been pretty crudely drawn onto the B, and we can observe also some damage on the G for instance, we can see that the parchment, there's a hole in the parchment, and this would have been caused by the ink, the actual ink that they were using attacked the support, that kind of reaction happens with paper as well as parchment, and in this case we can see that the ink has eaten through the parchment, the composition of the ink must have been slightly off, the ink is done with a component that is called iron gall, and here as well we can see from the other side, so it looks like lace, it makes the page quite fragile, because some parts of the written text are actually just like lace.