« quantum disentanglement | Main | preparation »
November 05, 2003
palimpsest
As popular pastimes go, reading and writing didn’t feature heavily in the lives of people in the Middle Ages, in fact it was reserved for just a few, and these few lived in seclusion, tucked away in draughty abbeys and dank monasteries on remote islands.
They wrote the gospels mainly, on parchment. The Abbot would decide the text to be written and generally illuminated in the monks' own inimitable way, and before you knew it rooms full of studious and skilful monks set about scratching with the dip pens and ink.
Then the Abbot moved on, and a new Abbot succeeded him, and he would have his own ideas about what text was to be written and illuminated. Parchment was not abundant, they couldn’t just send a monk out to WH Smiths and buy another box of the stuff. They had to spend months stretching, liming and scraping back the skins of goats and sheep to reach a beautiful smooth, strong sheet, often almost transparent. So when your man, the Abbot, changes the text, rather than throw the original away and pop out and catch another sheep, the monks would wash and scrape away the previous text and write the new one on top of the old.
Needless to say it was hard to get rid of all the text without scraping right through the parchment, so there were traces of the old lettering showing through under the new text. After a few new Abbots and many scrapings the resulting image is a palimpsest.
Today palimpsests occur on the hoardings around building sites when six months' worth of music posters decay and drop off in fragments.
Posted by john at November 5, 2003 10:35 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.deletetheweb.com/unstuck/mt/mt-tb.cgi/6