Manuscript Laboratory Worksheet: Determining Provenance and Descriptive Bibliography of Parchment MSS (Click here for tips when working with parchment MSS.)
Provenance (claimed and detectable): For MS lab 2, documents P1 through P5 were purchased by Arnold Sanders in late 2008. They were bought directly from a trove of 47 similar documents being sold by Phillip Pirages, a Washington State rare book and manuscript dealer. Document M1 was purchased in the summer of 2009 from William Marger, a Florida rare book dealer who was selling similar items on Ebay. Marger claims he bought his at auction in London. Neither can or will supply further provenance information.
Identification and Description of Textual Content--
Author(s) by name or attribute:
Text(s) by title or topic, in order of occurance by leaf count:
Place Names and Dates Mentioned:
Relation to Other Versions in MS or Print:
Physical Description--
Number of leaves/folia/pages:
Imposition (layout) of text on leaves/folia/pages:
Parchment size (h/w in cm.):
Text block size (h/w in cm:
Text outside text block: catch-words; marginalia; head and foot notes; interlinear notes.
Lines per page (most/least, average):
Words per line (most/least, average):
Characteristics of the script and hand (era, formality, abbreviations, distinctive letter forms):
Damage to the document (burns, tears, water-staining, ink blots, etc.):
Other document evidence not visible in digital surrogate: