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Observations of medieval bindings revealed a distinctive material: a fine white tawed skin, similar in appearance to parchment, but with flexibility suggestive of leather. A few rare medieval recip...

1. La collection de reliures romanes la plus importante d’Europe A titre de preliminaire, il ne semble pas inutile de preciser que le terme de reliure romane, qui fait l’objet de cette etude, est en quelque sorte impropre, meme s’il est largement employe par les historiens de la reliure. Cette reliure, dite romane, presente des caracteristiques structurelles similaires a celles des reliures apportees a Clairvaux par le prince Henri – troisieme fils du roi Louis VI le Gros –, qui ont ete confe...

Biocodicology, the study of the biological information stored in manuscripts, offers the possibility of interrogating manuscripts in novel ways. Exploring the biological data associated to parchment documents will add a deeper level of understanding and interpretation to these invaluable objects, revealing information about book production, livestock economies, handling, conservation and the historic use of the object. As biotechnological methods continue to improve we hope that biocodicology will become a highly relevant discipline in manuscript studies, contributing an additional perspective to the current scholarship. We hope that this review will act as a catalyst enabling further interactions between the heritage science community, manuscript scholars, curators and conservators.

Between 1941 and 1968, Marcel Duchamp produced a series of roughly 300 boxes, or Boites, containing, in his words, ‘everything important that I have done’ (Sargeant, W. 1952. Dada's Daddy: A New Tribute is Paid to Duchamp, Pioneer of Nonsense and Nihilism. Life, 32(17): 102). Over the course of 30 years and seven editions, Duchamp and his assistants filled these ‘portable museums’ with miniature reproductions of his most significant works. The materials used included leather, paper, cloth, metal, glass, ceramic, cellulose acetate, gouache, varnish, and wood. The variety of the constituent materials, and the complex physical and conceptual ways in which they interact, make conservation treatment of the Boites unusually challenging. The conservator must consider both the condition of the specific Boite being treated and its relationship to the dozens of other Boites still in existence. After an overview of the history and manufacture of Duchamp's miniature museum, the results of a pilot survey of th...