Tag Archives: oak galls

Around the Table Podcast: Teaching Manuscripts with Sara Charles

By Sarah Peters Kernan

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Sarah Kernan speaks with Sara Charles, a medieval book historian at the University of London. Sara recently published The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2024). She incorporates “historical remaking” into her research practices and she shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Follow Sara on Bluesky and Instagram for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Patricia Lovett, professional calligrapher

Christopher de Hamel, medieval manuscript expert

Oak gall ink

Theophilus, On divers arts

Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

L. Cornelissen & Son

Sara Making Parchment

www.teachingmanuscripts.com

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am thrilled to speak with Sara Charles today. Sara is a medieval book historian at the University of London. In addition to serving as the editor of the academic journal, Historical Research, at the Institute of Historical Research, and journals manager for the University of London Press, she also recently completed her PhD at the Institute of English Studies, researching medieval martyrologies. Sara incorporates historical remaking into her research practices, and she generously shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Last year, Sara published to wonderful reviews The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages with Reaktion Books. I am excited to speak to Sara today about her many experiences recreating inks and materials for making medieval manuscripts. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sara Charles 01:59

Thank you for having me. It’s pleasure to be here.

Sarah Kernan 02:01

Could we start by speaking about your interests in medieval manuscripts and how you go about examining and researching your interests? You really seem to have such skill for combining traditional research in special collections and archives with historical remaking. And I would love to hear more from you about these two methodologies.

Sara Charles 02:26

Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say. I think I have a background in working in museums and art galleries, as well as libraries. So, I think that kind of experience of public environments and communicating with a general audience has helped me a lot. Also, I trained as a librarian, which I think I really learned the importance of doing good research through that, understanding how knowledge is organized, the importance of cataloguing, and knowing how to use catalogues for research.

And I think that kind of all combined together with my research in book history. I also still work at the British Library on Saturdays in the manuscripts reading room, so I still have that kind of like, hands-on experience that every week of dealing with requests and talking about manuscripts and just being in that kind of the same physical space as them, which I do love. And I think for me, when I sort of first started coming into book history, there’s a, some of it is kind of, there’s a bit of an old fashioned air to it. And I thought, sometimes I felt quite intimidated by it. And I thought, if I do, then other people do. And I don’t want other people to, because it’s such a joyous world to experience. And so I guess I just wanted to share my enthusiasm and just to tell people, you know, it’s not scary. It’s for you. It’s for everyone. You know, it’s not just for academics.

Sarah Kernan 03:53

How did you become interested in the making side of things, making the inks and the other products, like the quills, for making medieval manuscripts? And where do you find the recipes and the instructions and actually source all the materials you use?

Sara Charles 04:10

I’ll try and work through all of those. So I first became interested in manuscripts when I was doing the library course, the Library and Information Studies Masters, and there were modules on manuscripts, and also rare books. But I just found manuscripts just so much more interesting because they were so, you know, everything was handmade. And there’s just something about that that is just so interesting and amazing.

And I think a large part of it was that I was really scared of touching manuscripts. When I went into a reading room, I was so scared because like the parchment wasn’t familiar to me. I didn’t know how to handle them. And I wanted to understand those materials to really get to grips with them, so that I so that I would be able to go into a reading room and feel confident handling a manuscript.

And so that was part of it. I wanted to kind of really deconstruct how they were made just so I could understand them. Patricia Lovett, who’s a really amazing calligrapher and illuminator, she does courses. So, I went to one of her illumination classes.

And that again, then opened up a whole new world of possibilities of like, wow, we can we can actually do this now. And that kind of like set me on my journey. And then I just started researching, you know, other people’s blog posts, books by Christopher de Hamel, and things like that. I started small. The first thing I did after the illumination class was I thought about making my own inks using oak galls, which are found on oak trees, the small round growths that found on oak trees. And I just happened to go to a small woodland that’s behind my house. And literally the first tree I looked at had them. And I was so thrilled.

And I’m not sure, perhaps if it hadn’t have been such a serendipitous moment, I don’t know if I’d have been so enthusiastic. But it was so exciting. It was this whole new world that was opening up to me. And so then I came home and I made the ink and it works. And it was just like, wow.

Sara Charles 06:13

And that encouraged me to want to do more and more. Now, I tend to go to the primary sources first to look for recipes and things. So, there’s things like Theophilus’ On divers arts. He was a twelfth-century German monk who wrote down a load of recipes. And he was a practitioner as well. So, you know that he’s writing these things down from his own experience.

Also, Cennino Cennini, in his Craftsman’s Handbook, that’s from the fifteenth century. And he was an Italian craftsperson. Again, he’s writing down what he knows, which just gives that air of authenticity, which is really great. So, I tend to start with the primary sources now, if I want to do something, and then kind of work from there now that I have that experience of, you know, maybe filling in the gaps between what is missing or converting what they’re saying when they’re using strange terminology and things like that.

And where do I source my ingredients and materials? I can make it myself, I do. And there’s things like for plant pigments. So, for woad, which is an indigo, dark blue. Madder, which is a reddish color. Also weld, which is a yellow color. You can grow those quite easily, certainly where I am here in in London. Grow those quite easily in the garden and harvest those. It sometimes takes a few years, but if I can do that, I will. Things like the black ink, so the iron gall, as I say, was luckily easy to source those. Carbon black as well, that’s a very easy one because you’re just collecting soot from an open flame. Also verdigris, the kind of them the green turquoise pigment, that’s a very easy one to do at home as well. You just need some copper strips and some vinegar. So things like that. If I can do it myself, I will.

But there’s also very dangerous pigments like orpiment, which is arsenic-based, or vermillion which is mercury sulfide, so I’m happy to use specialist art shops like Cornelissen for things like that. And then I’ve also prepared parchment and made hand-tooled leather and things like that, and paintbrushes and fox tooth burnishers, so yeah, if it’s possible I will do it myself, but I’m happy to, you know, if it’s dangerous, I’m happy to let the experts do that for me.

Sarah Kernan 08:37

Absolutely. I would too. You’ve had an experience with recreating and remaking a lot of these different materials. How does this making process help you understand better the training and the labor and the output of medieval scribes or any other craftspeople that were involved in the making process? Have you gained any surprising or unexpected insights because of your own experiences?

Sara Charles 09:09

Yeah, I mean, the thing that always stands out to me is just the amount of work you have to do before you even start putting anything on the manuscript. You know, you have to plan everything out in advance, what you need to buy. But also, you need to make sure things like trade networks are in place. So, you would need to import lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

You’re also relying on the weather and the environment. Like I say, a lot of the pigments are plant-based, so you need a good crop. You’d need such a vast array of sources from many different places. They come from the ground, from the workshop, manufactured in a workshop, or from the merchants importing stuff. So, you’d need to be able to access all these. You’d have to work out how much parchment was needed before you started.

Then you’d have to think about how much decoration to include, what pigments you were going to use, how much gold. It just would have been such an immense task. So, you’d need to access the resources. You’d need to know if you could afford the resources.

And also if you had the skilled artists and scribes to carry those out. So, I think the thing that always really stands out to me is just how much work would have needed to be done before you even started writing anything on the parchment. You would have needed such a lot of planning for the process and it blows my mind.

Sarah Kernan 10:25

Can you talk a little bit more about your work with remaking and specifically how it has impacted or informed your research? And I’m thinking here, if you could at least touch upon this, your recent book, The Medieval Scriptorium, every chapter begins with this wonderful narrative of a medieval scribe in a different place and time. And to me, it feels like those narratives are so richly informed by your experiences and talking not only about the weather and the room and the space that they worked in and the amount of light, but also the process of writing or what they were doing with their hands or their bodies at that time. And that just seems so informed by personal experience. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

Sara Charles 11:18

Yeah, yeah. And thank you for picking up on that, because that’s something that I really try to get into my writing. And I think actually the process that I enjoyed and learned from the most was making parchment. It was a really quite sobering experience because I had to go to the abattoir in the morning to collect the skins, and they were still warm.

So that was like really kind of like brings it home. Just what a visceral process it is. And then just going through that process. You soak it in lime to remove the hair. You stretch it on a wooden frame and then and then you scrape it with a lunellum.

It just gave me such a profound connection to the material. And it’s really amazing to be able to understand how the skin fit around the animal and you can still see the spine and the veins. that You can see imperfections where the animal had been bitten by insects. So, you’ve just got all those traces still on the parchment.

And you can feel how the different thicknesses as well. The skin’s much thicker around the sort of the shoulders and the neck area, and it’s much thinner around the tummy area. And you can feel that as you’re working around the parchment. And I found it really funny, and I did actually put this in my book. But when I went to bed that night after working on the skin all day, I could still feel it on my fingertips, I could still feel the texture of it.

And that really stayed with me. And I thought, well, that must have been, you know, how they felt as well. And it’s such a tactile process by necessity. But I think in turn that lends to a greater understanding, not just of what it would have been like to be a parchment maker, but also that relationship between humans and animals, and working with the natural materials to create these things of beauty. And as you say, it’s also interesting to see what parts of the body come under stress while you’re doing these things. Parchment’s very physical, making parchment, because you’re lifting and you’re scraping and you’re doing all of this with your arms. But the thing that I struggled with the most was my fingers not being dexterous enough when you’re tying it to the frame. And I didn’t expect that, you know, that was unexpected.

And then that leads me to wonder whether parchment makers would have suffered from arthritis in their later years, you know having to be so dexterous. Which, of course, is pure speculation, but it’s interesting how these practices can kind of like open your mind to pathways like that.

Sarah Kernan 13:41

Absolutely. That’s a really interesting observation. I’ve certainly thought about when I’ve sat and written things for a long time. I’ve thought, oh, I’m glad I’m not doing this for a living, writing out by hand. You know, I would have arthritis very early, but if you’re using your hands in the same way as a parchment maker… What inspired you to start posting all of these experiences on social media and on your website? Was it mainly for yourself or to inform other scholars? Or were you were you trying to reach out to a broader public, as you had kind of mentioned before?

Sara Charles 14:20

Yeah, I think what it was is, I was just so delighted when these things worked, that I just wanted to share it with people, you know, just want to say, wow, look at this, this is amazing. I was so thrilled when something actually worked. So, and I think as well, I’m doing it at home in my kitchen or whatever. So, it can be a bit lonely sometimes. So, you know, when something works, worked, I just wanted to, to share that. I don’t think I quite expected it to have the traction that it did. I didn’t expect people to be so, kind of, to come along with me as well. But it’s been really fantastic.

I think, maybe my cats, the inclusion of my cats might have had something to do with it, which I had no control over. They just invited themselves into these things. But you know that makes for a much more natural experience. It’s in a domestic setting.

And there would have been cats wandering around medieval workshops. So, you know, I think it just adds to the experience of what it would have been really like rather than something done in in a lab, you know, where everything’s very sterilized and things like that. I think it’s much more fun to do it and in a domestic environment.

Sarah Kernan 15:28

Has your cat made any paw prints, like we have evidence of?

Sara Charles 15:32

Yeah, I have had incidents of that. And also, as well, there was another time when I was copying something and the doorbell rang and the ink was still wet. And as I went to answer the door, one of my cats, she’s a rag doll cat, so she has this huge fluffy tail, and her tail just swept through the wet ink and smeared all over the lines above. So yeah, you have to watch them. It’s all part of the experience, I think. And medieval scribes have documented, yeah, the nuisance that cats and other animals can do to manuscripts.

I would say it’s the general audience that I have, which is, you know, always what I was aiming for. But I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how many academics have been supportive of what I do, as well. And I think there’s much more of an appetite now to bring these processes into the classroom. Certainly, you know, I did a summer school recently and I do a lot of workshops. And so, I think, yeah, there is definitely at the moment more interest in bringing that type of learning into the classroom. And I think also as well, everything now is kind of so artificial and overproduced and everything is digital. So, it’s just a real human instinct, I think, to want to connect with these natural produced items. Yeah, I think that’s why it appeals to people.

Sarah Kernan 16:55

Do people ever reach out to you with special requests of things to work on or things to post about?

Sara Charles 17:03

Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had a few people that have sort of come across strange recipes or strange recipes for things and they’ve wanted me to recreate them. So yeah, that’s always good fun.

Sarah Kernan 17:13

That is. What advice would you give anyone, particularly these students and teachers and researchers who are interested in incorporating craft and historical making into their research and teaching?

Sara Charles 17:27

I would say start small. Start with something that’s easy that you can do at home. You don’t need specialist equipment, or you don’t need, you know, dangerous equipment or materials for that matter. And do your research. Try to get as close to the original things as possible. When I’m making iron gall ink, I always go and source the gall nuts myself. I know that’s not possible for everyone, but I’ve only ever bought galls off of the internet once. And that’s the only time my ink didn’t work. So, you know, that was a lesson for me. Just do what you can within your means, but try and keep it as sort of authentic as possible.

Enjoy the process. You know, don’t focus on the end result on making like a perfect batch of ink or a perfect pigment, but just enjoy the process. Take time to think about how your senses are engaged, you know. What parts of your body are you using? How does your body adapt to different tasks? It’s amazing how often you will use your mouth as a third hand without even realizing it when you’re doing other things. And I just think that’s so interesting, the way your body just automatically puts itself in the right position for you to be able to do what you need to do.

Also say, don’t worry if it doesn’t work. You know, that it’s all part of the process. Then you can kind of have your own troubleshooting guide and you learn from that. The other thing I would say is document the process. Make notes, take videos, take photos, everything, because it’s amazing how much you forget when you step away from it. But if you’ve got that, photos and videos, I think work best for me. And then that just allows me to go back and look closer at what I was doing. Sometimes quite unconsciously, I was doing these things. And so, you want to look back and think, oh, right. So yeah, that’s how I added it. I added it gradually rather than quickly and things like that.

But yeah, it’s just a tremendous amount of fun. And it really just gives you so much greater insight into how things were made that I think it’s a great thing to do. I would encourage anyone when to do it according to their means and what they could do in their environment.

Sarah Kernan 19:34

Well, I have one final question for you. Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited about and want to talk about?

Sara Charles 19:45

So, I’ve just finished my PhD, so I’ll probably get a few things out from that. The Medieval Scriptorium book comes out in paperback in September. So, if anyone wants to get hold of a paperback copy, they can.

I am thinking about my next book, very much thinking about, rather than doing anything about. But what I’m really interested in is certainly after the manuscript making moved away from the monasteries and out into the workshops, the urban workshops. And there’s a street in Oxford called Catte Street.

And that’s where all the illuminators and scribes and bookbinders, they all lived in this one street. And I just think it’s a wonderful microcosm of everything that was going on. And we have surviving records of the people that live there. We have the tenement records. So, I just think it would be wonderful to just explore all those lives and all the people that were living there and how they interacted with each other.

I just think it must have been such a wonderful hub of creativity, especially at that time in the thirteenth century, I’d like to look at. When it was moving away from the monasteries and new ways of doing things was opening up. So, I’d really like to do some research and write a book about Catte Street in Oxford in the thirteenth century. But it’s still early days.

Sarah Kernan 21:08

That would be so interesting to read. I hope that you do work on that. I just kind of wonder what evidence there is of their own interactions or what you can glean.

Sara Charles 21:22

Yeah, they often, you know, they married each other. There’s brothers, sisters, parents, you know, all living in there. You know, they would be witness to documents and things like that. And they’d be like, you know, Thomas the Scribe or Roger the Bookbinder, so you know who they are or by their trade. And it would just be wonderful to kind of weave all those stories together.

Sarah Kernan 21:41

Absolutely. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Sara Charles 21:47

Thank you. It’s been very enjoyable.

Sarah Kernan 21:49

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

Making Ink

Making Ink

By Amy L. Tigner

ink-and-quillI had been thinking for a couple of years that I would like to try to make ink the early modern way. I had run across several recipes for ink over the years in my research of seventeenth-century receipt books and I had read Amanda Herbert’s blog in which she discusses making ink in an undergraduate class.  I was also interested to find blogs in which scholars were teaching reconstruction in their classrooms, such as Patty Baker and Laurence Totelin, who are making ancient recipes for a MOOC video (read about it here), or Amanda Herbert, who had her students try tasting early modern hot chocolate (here). Finally, last fall I had a chance to teach both an undergraduate and a graduate class entitled “Early Modern Women’s Writing and Literary Practice” and decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to make ink.  

As it turns out, my interest in making ink comes at a time when scholars are in the process of reconstructing historical recipes, such as Marjolijn Bol, who has made Leonardo da Vinci’s Walnut Oil and ancient Greek and Egyptian recipes for fake gem stones.  Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicossi write a blog that is all about cooking from early modern recipes in Cooking with the Archives.  Some larger reconstruction projects are also occurring around the world: ARTECHNE in Utrecht is working to rediscover historical art conservation techniques; and The Making and Knowing Project, which is interested in reconstructing art and craft techniques and recipes from the sixteenth century. The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective is working on a digital humanities project that is transcribing early modern recipe manuscripts that will eventually be available online; they often cook the recipes they are transcribing.

Back to my own project: the process of ink making turned out to be more expensive and more time-consuming that I had imagined, though both of these factors were also likely similar in the period and in the end a great learning experience.   I cheated a bit by looking on some ink-making websites that were quite helpful (especially, this one), as it explained about the chemistry of the ink making and also translated some of the recipe terms, such as “copperas” into “ferrous sulfate.”  The site also had links for purchasing ingredients.  I considered several different early modern recipes, but I finally decided on one of the several recipes in the Mary Grenville family receipt book manuscript (Folger V.a.430), because it was in English (some of the recipes are in Spanish) and it was the simplest in terms of ingredients, steps, and time.

granville-to-make-ink-very-well-p-42

To make=Inke=Verie Good

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beerevinegre, a pound of galls bruised, halfe a pound of coperis, and 4 ounces of gum bruised, first mix your water and vinegre together, and put itinto an earthen Jug, then put in the galls, stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme, as you use it straine itt.

Most recipes use some kind of wine or vinegar that keeps the ink from molding, but this particular one uses beer vinegar, which I discovered is quite easy to make by combining the “mother” of cider vinegar and a bottle of beer, then letting it ferment for several days. As for the galls, I had been collecting oak galls on my walks in the spring and had several gallon zip lock bags full, but when I weighed them I had only about 6 ounces—not close enough to the one pound required. It turns out that Texas oak galls are the big, light, and fluffy apple gall rather than the smaller but denser traditional iron oak gall.

shumard-red-oaks-apple-gall

Not trusting the Texas apple galls would work, I ordered a pound from Amazon for $45, and they arrived from Guatemala (link here):

iron-oak-galls

These I “bruised” with a meat hammer and then combined with the beer vinegar and rainwater. Because the mixture needed to “stand” for 8 or 9 days, I decided that I would do this in advance, so that we could simply add the final ingredients in class and try out the ink immediately.  I reserved the big fluffy apple oak galls for students to pound in class. The last two ingredients: gum arabic and the coperias (ferrous sulfate or green vitriol) I also ordered online from Amazon and Natural Pigments, respectively. I knew that gum arabic takes a while to dissolve, so I decided that I would pre-dissolve the crystals, first by grinding them into small pieces in a mortar and pestle and then placing them in hot water and finally I strained out the impurities. That process took about 24 hours.

ink-making

On the ink-making day, students assembled the ingredients following the recipe. The most surprising and exciting part was adding the ferrous sulfate, which turned the formerly beer-brown liquid into the blackest black.

dsc01576

We then strained the liquid and poured them into old spice bottles. The recipe made enough for each student to have a bottle.

dsc01590The ink turned out to be very good in terms of viscosity and color–and I’d argue better than the run of the mill India ink you can buy on the market.  Students really loved the project, especially as they were actively involved, and I am certainly planning to make ink the next time I teach a manuscripts class, though perhaps I will try a different recipe.

Amy L. Tigner teaches in the English Department at the University of Texas, Arlington.