Most of the samples for analysis are now safely in the Copenhagen laboratory. Thanks to the good offices of Jo Story and Jiří Vnouček, the samples from the two manuscripts in th Vatican have now been taken also, in this case by Simone Olini from the BAV. As always, we have to thank the archivists, librarians and conservators for their professionalism and their constant positive attitude to research and researchers. The guardians of our precious heritage objects are a key part of research and their efforts probably don’t always get the praise they merit.
In this case, there is a mixture of samples, some are the rubbings and some are fibres. Different archives prefer different approaches, as will be the case when we go to Paris and Florence respectively over the next six weeks to collect the final set of samples from our corpus. Although the rubbings are better for proteomics and the fibre better for genomics, (details of biocodicology in the linked article by Fiddymnet et al.) both methods can be used for each. The recent article by Louis l’Hote, Kevin Daly et. al.”Three thousand five hundred years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes” is a tremenously exciting development which shows some of the possibilities of these techniques. We may be able to add further information to this research on viruses as our own genomic data becomes available – this would be particularly valuable since samples of capripox/sheeppox havenot yet been found in research on the Iberian Peninsula.
We have now received the first provisional results on species ids from some proteomic analysis, and we seem to be seeing a greater presence of goatskin membranes than we would previously have expected, so we will be working hard to build up a clear picture of the species employed across the corpus. Whilst we do not yet have PQI (Parchment Quality/Glutamine Index) data for all of our samples, we hope to have this in time to present on the subject of a subset of our manuscripts at the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural Español conference in November. The manuscripts in question are the Libro de astrología from the Biblioteca Histórica Maqués de Valdecilla, and the additional Heredia manuscripts from the Biblioteca Nacional, which we sampled at the suggestion of Luz Díaz Galán from the BNE laboratory. The first of these was heavily restored in the 1970s, and we hope to see from the PQI data if there is anything we can see in the chemical composition of the manuscript which would help the conservators in their principal role of ensuring the good health of the manuscript. In the case of the BNE manuscripts, there is some damage on quite a few of the folios, and here we would like to know if the difference in PQI between the damaged and undamaged parts of the same folios can helpthe conservators restore the codices.
None of these questions were anticipated when we designed the project, rather they have emerged organically from our discussions with those who know the manusctipts best. Such unanticipated research is only possible through the interdisciplinary approach fostered by the APEX grant scheme, so we are duly thankful for the support of the Royal Academy, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. The value of braod research questions, and the trust of funding bodies in the experts they support, has never been more obvious!