>I have been wondering about that too, and not out of idle curiosity: you
>see, I study Vivarium (the physical site in Calabria, now called Coscia
>di Staletti, and sheep are still there - in fact, I am happy to report,
>the sheep owner just won a lawsuit with the landowner, marchese
>Lucifero, who wanted to evict him. The sheep still graze where Vivarian
>sheep did, and, being on good terms with the shepherds, I could easily
>find out how many are there today. If I knew how many were needed for a
>Bible, I could figure out how many actually existed at Vivarium - could
>you and your professor help? Luciana
A very interesting question, but it seems unlikely that a monastery,
especially a center of studies like Vivarium, was able to rely completely
on its own sources of parchment. That's an awful lot of sheep.
It's been a long time since we tried to calculate number of sheep hides
needed for an Alcuin Bible (sometime in the mid 80's). As I recall, we
used sheep sizes as given in Malcolm Todd's "The Northern Barbarians, 100
BC- AD 300" (revised ed. Blackwell 1987)---his section on agriculture has
fascinating data comparing animals in the Roman Iron Age to modern
breeds---and came up with a likelihood that the average sheep could have
contributed 2 folios to the Alcuin Bible. But I can't remember (and can't
find in any notes) how many folios there were.
Phyllis
Phyllis G. Jestice
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