![]() ![]() The white alum tawed leather was prepared with the minimum of paring using the full thickness of the skin where possible. 3 Sewing cords laced into channels cut in the board. Like the sewing, this work also emulates methods employed in early medieval book making. Channels were cut into their inner surface and the sewing supports and endband cores were laced on to give a very robust mechanical attachment between the text block and binding boards. ![]() The next stage was the attachment of the new cushioned ‘blue jean’ binding boards. The endband thread was passed through a vellum ‘slotted spine’ which protects the backfolds of the quires and gives some resistance to the opening characteristics of the manuscript. Once the manuscript was sewn it was removed from the frame and endbands were sewn at the head and tail with the same cabled linen cord as the endband. 2 Sewing MS 59 employing techniques practiced for centuries. The sewing needle was modified by bending the shaft to allow an easier transition between the cords.įig. At the changeover point it passed into the next quire and the process was repeated travelling in the opposite direction. The linen thread was passed into the centre fold of each quire and out and around each of the double linen cord sewing supports. The sewing commenced with the new front vellum flyleaf followed by each of the six quires of the text block and finally the new back flyleaf. The cords were fabricated by cabling unbleached linen thread to the required thickness. The traditional sewing frame was set up with the new linen cords attached and tensioned. The opportunity was taken to photograph the backfolds prior to sewing as valuable clues to previous bindings visible at this stage would be again hidden once the manuscript was resewn and bound. There is evidence of Irish scholars traveling to European medical schools, and bringing their learning back to the medical schools of Ireland.īecause of the importance of the manuscript fragment to the history of Irish learning and medicine, the owners agreed that the binding should be removed from the book by John Gillis of TCD, opened out and digitised under the supervision of Professor Ó Macháin to whom they entrusted the book, and a new binding provided.Ī public seminar on 'The Avicenna Fragment' and on aspects of Gaelic medieval medicine will be hosted by UCC on 7 March at 2pm.As was detailed in the previous blog we carefully planned in advance the rebinding of MS 59 once the extensive additional repairs to the brittle and damaged vellum of the backfolds had been carried out. Medical scholarship in medieval Gaelic Ireland was on a par with that practised on the Continent, and was the most outward-looking of all the native branches of learning. The existence of this text was not hitherto known in Ireland. The Irish fragment contains parts of the opening chapters on the physiology of the jaws, the nose and the back. The 'Canon of Medicine' was a medical encyclopaedia which, through translation into Latin (from which the Irish text itself is translated), achieved great popularity in Europe, where state-of-the-art medical theory and practice in medieval times had their origins in the Muslim world. It is a fragment of a translation into Irish – previously unrecorded – of the ‘Canon of Medicine’ by the Persian physician Ibn Sena (980–1037), also known as Avicenna, considered one of the most significant physicians in the Islamic Golden Age. The identity of the text was established immediately by Ó Macháin’s collaborator of many years, Professor Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, the only living expert on medieval Irish medicine. "A quarter of what survives of late-medieval manuscripts in the Irish language is medical in content," says Ó Macháin, "an indication of the practical purpose of these books in Ireland of the time." "The use of parchment cut from old manuscripts as a binding for later books is not unusual in European tradition," says Pádraig, "but this is the first time that a case has come to light of such a clear example of the practice in a Gaelic context."įrom photographs of the binding supplied by the owners, Professor Ó Macháin established that the Irish text was a medical one. This consisted of a sheet, full of text in Irish, cut from a 15th-century Irish vellum manuscript, that had been trimmed and folded and stitched to the spine of the printed book in order to form a sturdy binding. ![]()
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