Good Wood: Using Beech to Rebind a Medieval Manuscript, Part 4

This is a guest post by John Bertonaschi, Senior Rare Book Conservator in the Conservation Division.

In part 3 of this series, I wrote about how my colleague Senior Rare Book Conservator Katherine Kelly and I got our 13^th century Law Library manuscript Decretum Gratiani ready for rebinding. I related how we took the old binding off, reduced distortion in the parchment, and mended tears and holes. Now, I want to speak about our preparations for putting the manuscript back into a sympathetic binding which will help keep it safe and accessible for future generations.

The first binding our manuscript would likely have been put into in the 14^th century can be characterized as Romanesque. The term “Romanesque” is generally used to describe a style of architecture. It was first used in connection with books by the British historian G.D. Hobson in his 1929 publication English Binding before 1500. Hobson, like nearly all other book historians up until the 1960’s, was concerned primarily with the decoration of books. Today, we identify books as Romanesque based on certain structural features, among which are sewing onto substantial alum-tawed supports, and thick wooden boards which are attached to the text by feeding the supports through tunnels cut into the edges of the boards. Some contemporary scholars, particularly the late Christopher Clarkson and his disciples, believe that the Romanesque era was perhaps the last great period of structural innovation in Western bookbinding. When studying medieval books, one cannot help but admire the skill and understanding of materials shown by the Romanesque binder.

When I say a “sympathetic” binding, I mean one which is similar in style to the way we think the manuscript would have been bound when it was created. Since we can’t know precisely what this book looked like, we must make educated guesses based on a lot of study and research. We did a thorough examination of our own manuscript, examined the few examples we have of late Romanesque bindings in LC collections, looked at digitized images of books in libraries in other parts of the world, and read everything we could get our hands on related to Romanesque binding in the conservation literature. This approach requires a certain sensitivity in trying to understand what the medieval binder was after while also keeping in mind the needs of our manuscript. There is no how-to manual for rebinding a medieval book, or any historic book, for that matter.

One of the problems we face is that so few of the bindings produced during this period have survived. The Romanesque book evolved in monastic binderies, the high point of this style coinciding with the high point of the monastic period in the 12^th century. Clarkson, writing about books in English collections, estimated that, of the large number of manuscripts produced during the monastic period in Great Britain only a relative few have come down to us, and of these few only perhaps 1% are in their original bindings and in a more or less untouched state.

So, how does one go about making a “modern” Romanesque binding? Since this was the first experience rebinding a medieval book for both Katherine and I, we agreed that we each needed to make a few practice models to familiarize ourselves with the structure and to work out all the details of construction. We also had to acknowledge certain limitations. Manuscripts in the Romanesque period were written almost exclusively on parchment, and the Romanesque binding was designed to contain a parchment text block. There is no way under heaven we could use parchment for our models, so we had to accept that we would be practicing with paper text blocks. We know that our manuscript was originally sewn on alum-tawed thongs, and we would have dearly loved to use the same type of supports for the rebinding, but even the high-quality tawed thongs produced in the Middle Ages tended to break at the flex point where the boards open away from the text.

This is due to the geometry of the board attachment, with the heavy thongs having to bend rather acutely as the book is opened. With all due respect to Chris Clarkson, this can be seen as a weakness in the structure. To counteract this, we determined to sew onto cords made of hemp fiber, which are durable, but also much more flexible.

We fashioned boards from our Montgomery-County-Parks-donated beech, re-sawing the thick planks with a frame saw, planing, and cutting the lacing tunnels and channels with a chisel. We are not woodworkers per se but had to add some of these skills to our toolbox in order to accomplish the task.

Paper and parchment repair, sewing, woodworking, leatherworking, metalworking – a book conservator is in a sense a jack-of-all-trades. The monastic binder certainly was.

Some Romanesque books produced in monastic binderies have a lining of tawed skin on the spine, which was attached to the edges of the boards, and was intended to keep paste off the backs of the parchment sections when covering. This lining could be pasted to the board edges, but a more secure attachment was achieved with trenails or tree nails – nails made of wood. We liked this idea so much we had to incorporate it into our treatment and figured out how to manufacture trenails using offcuts of beech, a file, and a drill press.

Another appealing feature of some Romanesque bindings are corners over which the covering skin has been mitered and stitched together. We really enjoyed practicing this technique!

One of the most difficult details we had to work out was how to handle the ends of the spine. Books from the era of our manuscript often had endbands of plain thread covered in one form or another with decorative embroidery, sometimes elaborate and beautifully worked. Model making gives us an opportunity to determine what form our endbands will take and provides us with essential practical experience.

The finished models are like heavy little bricks, which, despite their blockiness, open very well. The medieval binder would likely have put some form of closure on a bound manuscript, metal clasps or a strap and pin, to essentially turn the book into a press in which the parchment text block was held under some tension to keep it from cockling. We will pass on this feature since our manuscript will be housed in a box and sit upright on a shelf between other books.

Once we’ve made our decisions about how we want our Romanesque-style book to look and are comfortable executing all the steps involved, we will move on to the rebinding of our manuscript, the subject of the next and final post in this series. Watch for it!

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