When paper was on the rise and began to supplant parchment, some manuscripts were made of both materials, paper and parchment. In these cases, parchment was often used for the outermost and innermost leaves of a quire, while the leaves ‘inside’ the quire were paper, presumably because such a quire structure makes the mixed-material manuscript sturdier.
Such mixed-material manuscripts “are not infrequently found”, according to Rodney M. Thompson.
In this blogpost I wanted to write about Icelandic mixed-material manuscripts, however, I found only very few examples. Six, to be precise. Four of these six are later compilations of originally individual parts (AM 207 b I and II 4to, AM 367 I-III 4to, AM 406 a II 4to, AM 1056 II and XXXIX 4to). This leaves us with two manuscripts that were originally made of both parchment and paper.
AM 434 c 12mo is from the first half of the seventeenth century and contains superstitious texts on 22 leaves. AM 467 12mo is from the last third of the seventeenth century and contains two calendars on 54 leaves. The first 48 leaves are parchment (and contain not one but two title pages!), and fols 49-54 are paper.
The question arises why there are so few Icelandic paper-parchment manuscripts. Was it availability, durability, or chance? Were there mixed-material manuscripts that did not survive until our times, or rather the time when manuscripts were catalogued? Did some Icelanders have access to either parchment or paper but not both? Did the maker of AM 467 12mo use paper for the last few leaves because he or she had run out of parchment? Was paper already so well-established that Icelanders skipped the ʻmixingʼ stage of manuscript production? What do you think? And do you know other mixed-material manuscripts?
Further reading:
Rodney M. Thompson et al., “Technology of Production of the Manuscript Book,” in: The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2: 1100-1400, ed. by Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thompson, 75-109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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