WASTE PARCHMENT
Rare Book BX 4920.I557 1502
Introduction to the Parchment
This waste parchment has been bound as a spine enforcement as part of the original binding for a copy of Sancte Romane ecclesie fidei defensionis clippeum aduerses waldensium seu pickadorum heresim: certas Germanie Bohemieqz nations in odium cleri ac eneruationem ecclesiastice potestis uirulenta contagione sparsim inficientes. This book was written by Heinrich Institor (Heinrich Kramer) in 1502 and printed in the town of Olomouc in the Czech Republic.
The waste parchment itself has been taken from a liturgical book, and it contains prayers, chants and instructions needed for the celebration of mass. The majority of the parchment indicates that it is from ‘The Proper of Saints’ section of a Missal which identifies the calendar of Saints' feast days and lists prayers and chants for each day.
The hand of the script on the waste parchment is a Gothic textualis - a dense, angular script used in the common book culture of Northwestern Europe from the twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. The main text in this transcription is bold with thicker marks, laterally compressed and larger letters. This script is used for any biblical entries as well as the prayers, chapters and hymns of the included Saint days. Words of significance beginning sections have their first letter capitalized.
For my transcription and commentary, I have numbered each page respective to where I believe their position in the original book would have been using the dates of the feast days and prayers of the saints mentioned. Starting with the two connected folios, each single folio will have content consecutive to each other because they are on the same sheet of parchment. Knowing this I could work out which side of each folio was the recto and which the verso. Since the side beginning ‘-fulsit’ includes a Saint day on January 25th and the side beginning ‘p(rae)sidiis’ starts with a prayer to a Saint for the 27th, I knew that ‘-fulsit’ was on the recto and ‘p(rae)sidiis’ on the verso. Even though the recto to the sheet beginning ‘p(rae)sidiis.’ If this was not the innermost bifolium in its quire, and there may be text missing between this verso and the recto on the other half of this bifolium, beginning ‘eulalie’; however, it followed closely, considering the date of the feasts on that page. I used the same technique for the upside-down folio connected to these two adjoined sheets - comparing the dates of feast days mentioned I concluded that the sheet beginning ‘num’ was the recto and the sheet beginning ‘hec’ was the verso. This folio as expected by its orientation was from a completely different part of the book. Lastly for the section of parchment at the front of the book I concluded that the folio that had been deliberately trimmed came before its adjacent folio with ‘eccl(es)iam’ on the recto and ‘-ago’ on the verso. These two conjoined folios definitely had a couple of quires between them since the date of the feast day on the adjacent recto is around a month and a half after the feast day on the verso.