Entertainment / Literature / Parchment: Goatskin or sheepskin used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of 'paper.' A technical distinction is usually made between parchment and vellum, which is made from the hide of young calves. As Michelle P. Brown notes in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, the process for creating vellum or parchment is quite complicated: To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunular knife while damp. They could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin pused. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing) but remained in use for certain high-grade books. (95)
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Lifestyle / Coffee / Parchment Coffee: Describes wet-processed coffee shipped with the dried parchment skin still adhering to the bean. The parchment is removed prior to roasting, a step called milling. MORE