Cédric Lelievre: Looking for economical solutions for the treatment of a valuable 15th-century illuminated parchment manuscript.
This paper describes the conservation treatment of an illuminated manuscript from the 1480s (Ms 1 et 2, Bibliothèque de Macon. Early French version of St. Augustine’s "La cité de Dieu")
The challenge of this treatment was twofold:
- To flatten about 100 leaves without dismantling the binding, in the limited time-frame of six months.
- To stabilise the flatness of the text bloc, despite the defects of the binding.
This work called for economical solutions, and technical experiments. The funding was limited and because the binding could not be removed it was necessary to design and create a flattening model, to humidify the parchment locally, and to keep the text bloc under permanent pressure after treatment.
The treatment also included a condition report on the 20 full-page miniatures that needed to be consolidated.