Parchment

Parchment is a writing surface created from the untanned, specially prepared skins of animals, most often sheep, calves, and goats. For over two thousand years, it has served as a writing material in West Asia and Europe. A finer grade of parchment, known as vellum, is made specifically from calfskin. To avoid having to choose between the terms parchment and vellum, libraries and museums sometimes use the neutral phrase "animal membrane."

In non-technical use today, "parchment" often refers to any animal skin—particularly from goats, sheep, or cows—that has been scraped or dried under tension. Originally, though, the word referred only to sheepskin and, occasionally, goatskin. The finer material made from calfskin was called vellum, a term that traces back through Old French and Latin to the word for calf. The finest quality of all was known as uterine vellum, which many believed came from the skin of a calf fetus or stillborn calf. However, modern research on 13th-century pocket Bibles has found no evidence of this; instead, scholars suggest the finer grade resulted from a lost technique rather than fetal hides.

Some authorities, such as lexicographer Samuel Johnson in 1755 and master calligrapher Edward Johnston in 1906, tried to keep these distinctions strict. Yet when examining old books and documents, it is often difficult—without scientific analysis—to determine the exact species or age of the animal that provided the skin. Consequently, the boundaries between the terms have long been blurred. In 1519, William Horman noted that the material for writing, made from animal skins, was sometimes called parchment, sometimes vellum, sometimes abortive, and sometimes membrane. In Shakespeare's *Hamlet*, Hamlet asks if parchment is made of sheepskins, and Horatio replies that it is also made of calves' skins. By 1936, Lee Ustick observed that among manuscript collectors, vellum was considered a highly refined form of skin, while parchment was a cruder, thicker, less polished version, with no distinction made between calf, sheep, or goat. For these reasons, many modern conservators, librarians, and archivists prefer the broader term "parchment" or the neutral "animal membrane."

The word "parchment" evolved from the name of the city of Pergamon, a major center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period. A legend, recorded by Pliny the Elder, claimed that parchment was invented there to replace papyrus after Alexandria monopolized that material. This story is almost certainly false, as parchment had been used in Anatolia and elsewhere long before Pergamon's rise. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, mentions writing on skins as common, noting that the Ionians of Asia Minor called books "skins" (diphtherai), a term later adopted by Hellenized Jews for scrolls. Other cultures also had a long history with prepared animal skins: David Diringer noted that Egyptian documents on leather date back to the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2550–2450 BC), with extant examples from the Sixth Dynasty, the Twelfth Dynasty, the reign of Ramses II, and a mathematical text now in the British Museum. The Assyrians and Babylonians, though they usually impressed cuneiform on clay tablets, also wrote on parchment from the 6th century BC onward.

By the 4th century AD, parchment began to replace papyrus as the standard material for important books in cultures that had traditionally used papyrus. Most preserved works were transferred from papyrus to parchment. The high cost of parchment compared to papyrus led to the loss of the vast majority of ancient literature, and the production of new works largely stopped until cheaper materials appeared. This contributed to the early Middle Ages being known as the Dark Ages.

In the later Middle Ages, especially the 15th century, paper largely replaced parchment for most uses, except for luxury manuscripts. New paper-milling techniques made paper much cheaper than parchment, and it was made from high-quality textile rags. After the arrival of printing in the late 15th century, the supply of animal skins could not keep up with printers' demands. For a short period, parchment and paper were used together, with parchment (specifically vellum) being the more expensive luxury option, preferred by wealthy and conservative customers. Most copies of the Gutenberg Bible are on paper, but some were printed on parchment; of the 48 surviving copies, 12 are on parchment, though most are incomplete. In 1490, Johannes Trithemius preferred the older methods, arguing that handwriting on parchment would last a thousand years, while he questioned how long printing would endure.