Welcome again to Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe.
Today, we are starting the third unit,
and I hope that you will find it especially
interesting because we have a lot of hands-on work to do.
And speaking about hands,
we are going to get our hands dirty, literally.
In this unit, I have condensed two units of my regular course on codicology.
The units dedicated to the copyist tools,
this subsection is called the writing case.
And another unit about the material structure of the codex.
As a consequence, I had to omit a lot of details.
But if you are still interested and want to know more about it,
you can visit my website on codicology at codicology.atspace.cc.
And its more advanced Spanish version at codicologia.atspace.cc.
But now, back to our course.
As I said, the first sub-unit is dedicated to the copyist writing case,
that is the copyist tools,
which of course include quill and pen knife,
and other instruments together with inks,
black and colors as well.
Of course, the technology is necessary to make them all are not exactly high tech.
And if you want, you can make them yourself
with the original materials if you can find them,
or if not, you can get a little creative.
I am sure you can find something at home that will serve the purpose.
And as I promised before,
we are going to get our hands dirty as we make some inks,
a black ink and two like pigments,
one red and another yellow.
For that purpose, my friend Stefanos Crustalis will be with us this unit.
He is an internationally reputed manuscript restorer
and expert in medieval pigment recipes.
And I have added some recordings of my own where,
by the way, I screwed up.
But although I'm being funny,
I think we can get a teaching moment out of it.
You can repeat all these at home if you wish with the same ingredients we are using here,
but also, you can experiment with other products.
Maybe you are not as unhandy as me and you get it right on the first time.
As you can imagine, medieval chemistry is not very complicated,
and you won't need much more than some glass parts,
a small fire, and your kitchen sink.
If you dare to try, send us photos,
video or simply some remarks about your experience.
We are all looking forward to reading them in the forums.
If you do not have the time or for some other reason can not try this,
do not worry because this activity is not
compulsory to get the certification of completion of the course.
The second half of the unit is about a material structure of the codex.
You will remember from the last week,
a book in codex format is almost always built of choirs or gatherings,
each one shown to the previous and following ones.
Now, we shall dedicate three videos to see how the gatherings or choirs were built,
and how medieval copyists works with them,
and which systems they used for the purpose of keeping their gatherings together,
and to indicate the gatherings for the bookbinder.
If you have chosen the hands-on project,
you will repeat the same process for your own codex.
But I will elaborate more on this in the video about the hands-on project for this week.
As always, you will have to take
a self evaluation if you want to get the course certification of completion.
And do not forget to visit the forums in order to ask anything and answer,
if you can, your classmates questions.
As always feel free to leave any remark or suggestion that you consider valuable.