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The fact that historical archives, libraries, museums, writing workshops and even monasteries currently hold medieval manuscripts is not just a question of heroes or ordinary people who have had the trouble of save them, transmitting them from one generation to the next, or hiding them so that they are not destroyed. The material used to write and draw on paper was crucial for surviving written texts to be read, translated and interpreted today.
Determine the chemical reactions of the components that made it possible to write on paper and lasted for hundreds of years, this was the goal of the research group on the medieval history of the Meridians of the United States. University of Cordoba. For months, this group focused its work on these chemical reactions in collaboration with chemists from Nova University Lisbon.
This team, led by Professor of Medieval History of the University of Cordoba, Ricardo Córdoba, duplicated five medieval inks, using each method and each ingredient of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How did they do it? By badyzing handwritten ink-making recipes, carefully traversing various parts of the world, such as the Bishop of Braga's Chancery in Portugal, where a recipe from 1464 is kept, the Montpellier School of Medicine Library, with another dating from 1469 to 1480, as well as the historical archives of the province of Córdoba, dated 1474.
These five unpublished documents reproduced the five inks. Pomegranate peels, galls used by plants to defend against pests, vitriol, water and gum arabic, made from recipes using animal skin, are part of the ingredients of these inks and of those which the researchers mixed in the same quantity, proportion, temperature and method indicated in the medieval recipes, and with which it was possible to reproduce exactly the same inks as those used six centuries ago.
The results of this collaborative research between historians and chemists have recently been published in the journal Heritage Science. This research included the translation of the texts and procedures described in the medieval recipes, the manufacture of inks by following the detailed instructions provided in the recipes and the badysis of the chemical reactions of these combinations of ingredients, in view of the keys of the preservation of written heritage. Thanks to the exact replication and badysis of inks used in the Middle Ages, researchers can determine what treatments historical documents should undergo in order to recover and improve their current state and, most importantly, to ensure that They last longer physically.
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Material provided by University of Cordoba. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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