Re: VMs: Counting sheep...?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Barbara,

At 10:49 29/02/2004 +0000, Barbara bubbled:
> Usually Vellum is made from calfskin. Calves are _roughly_ twice the size of
> a sheep. If one doubles the dimensions then one *quadruples* the surface
> area.
> Therefore the number of calves needed to make the vms in vellum would be a
> about a quarter of the number of sheep needed if it had been made in
> parchment.

Erm... it actually depends on what you mean by "size". If you mean 
"weight", that would depend on volume (closer to a power of three), whereas 
surface area would be more like a power of two. (Keeping non-fractal, of 
course: what is the Hausdorff dimension of a sheepskin?)

So, the skin from a 140-pound calf should have rather less than twice the 
surface area of the skin of a 70-pound lamb. Mathematically speaking, of 
course. :-)

> Now, a question, for I confess to great confussion here; what relevence has
> the number of animals that went "into" the vms have to our studies?
> I fail to see it myself :-(

The lack of physical evidence means that we're informed only by very 
superficial things about the VMs: this yields a general inability to refute 
even the wildest of opinions, which can act like a handbrake permanently 
slowing us down. Anything that helps contribute to a physical understanding 
of the VMs as a physical object is fine by me - as a direct result of the 
thread, I'm now looking at vellum not as an analogue of paper, but as a 
piece of stretched, pounced and trimmed animal skin, with two different 
sides (as the old punchline goes, an inside and an outside).

So, what does the (suggested?) thinness of the vellum tell us - that the 
animals used were younger, or that someone had to work harder to thin them? 
What does that tell us about the cost? Or about the production process 
involved? Or about the person who bought the vellum? What does the 
raggedness of some pages tell us?

Once you have a convenient transcription of a manuscript (or even a 
convenient set of images), the strong temptation is to shut your eyes to 
the physical object itself - but in the case of the VMs, please try to resist!

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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