Parchment Panomics: A Holistic Approach to Understanding and Conserving Parchment Manuscripts

Project Group

In cooperation with the Kairouan Manuscript Project and the Tunisian National Heritage Institute’s National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts, this PG will explore the material life cycles of parchment manuscripts from the former library of the Grand Mosque in Kairouan, Tunisia. The PG will advance methods of material analysis, gain insight into the historical context of a specific corpus of WAs and contribute to their conservation. For this aim it will employ a combination of minimally invasive omics approaches, including DNA, protein, metabolite, elemental, and microbiological analyses. Combined with codicological, philological and historical research, this will allow conclusions on individual artefacts’ provenance and life cycles. The PG’s holistic approach of integrating humanities and innovative scientific analyses will thus shed new light on the Kairouan collection and offer a more detailed description of parchment-writing’s material ecologies. The PG’s work will also contribute to refining conservation techniques, thereby increasing the artefacts’ chances of survival, notably by endeavouring to understand the factors contributing to parchment decay, including environmental conditions, historical production and conservation practices.