BnF Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 84v: “Sand” with ox foot bone and elm root
Co-Authors: Stephanie Pope and Caroline Marris
French transcription:
<title id=”p084v_a1″>Sable</title>
<ab id=”p084v_b1a”>Jay essaye los de pieds de boeuf fort brusle & pulverise & broye<lb/>
bien fort sur le porphire jusques a ce quil ne se sente<lb/>
point entre les doigts Il moule tout seul fort net Mays<lb/>
pourceque de soy mesme il est aride & maigre il veult estre<lb/>
fort mouille & humecte avecq vin bouilly avecq racine dorme</ab>
English translation:
<title id=”p084v_a1″>Sand</title>
<ab id=”p084v_b1a”>I tried the foot bones of an ox, quite burned, pulverized and very well crushed on porphyry, until it is fine enough to slip through your fingers without being felt. On its own, it makes a very clean mold. But because on its own it is very dry and lean, it demands to be well wet and humidified, with a thick broth with elm root.</ab>
BnF Ms. Fr. 640 features various recipes for sandcasting, typically involving the combination of a dry element and a wet binding agent, the latter of which is often referred to as ‘magistry’. While nearly all sandcasting recipes feature this basic combination, the substances that can fulfil the role of ‘dry’ or ‘wet’ elements are diverse. For instance, ‘magistry’ can refer to anything from egg whites (on fol. 68r, the author states that “for big [sandcasting] works it is necessary to wet the sands with egg white or magistra”) to salt water (on fol. 84v, under the heading ‘Eau Magistra’), to wine, as is the case in this recipe.
Ox foot bone ash makes up the dry component of the sand in the recipe on fol. 84v, with which this annotation is concerned. This substance is referenced at various other points in the manuscript as an ideal medium for sandcasting: for instance, on fol. 67v, in a recipe entitled “Ox foot bones for sand” (“Os de pied de beuf pour sable”), the author informs us that “[b]eing well burned two times & pulverized, they mold very cleanly as sand and do not need to be recooked, but just heated with the flame of straw”. Ox bones also feature in a recipe for sand on fol. 89r, which involves pulverizing them, moistening them with a sheet of paper “made wet…from the moisture of the night”, and then combining it with rock salt.
The wet component of the recipe on fol. 84v is a “thick broth with elm root”. Elm root is almost solely alluded to throughout the manuscript in connection with making a binder for sandcasting: in fact, the only reference to elm roots that is not connected with this practice is on fol.71r, in the author-practitioner’s discussion of the colours of various woods for inlay work. The author writes:
Root of elm has beautiful […] grey and black. It is the same for maple-tree, but you should choose the grain very carefully…
What is initially unclear in this recipe is how exactly one should go about making a broth from elm roots. The author seems to assume it is an unproblematic procedure, one that his readers would probably be familiar with already. However, other recipes calling for elm roots in the manuscript clarify the procedure. On fol. 69r, the author states that “lean” (“maigres”) sand (more on the concept of ‘lean’ and ‘fatty’ sands later) can be moistened by the addition of “wine boiled with elm tree roots or something similar”. Another recipe for “Magistry”, on fol. 87v, states that “Founders harvest the roots of a young elm when it is sappy, and boil it in wine, or better yet vinegar”. It thus seemed reasonable that the broth to which the recipe on fol. 84v is referring would be produced by boiling elm roots in wine. However, we were still unsure at this stage as to the value of boiling elm roots in wine to make a binder, particularly as other recipes in the manuscript call for wine alone (“good pure wine”, for example, on fol. 69r) as a moistening agent. What qualities might the elm root impart to the wine? Given that the author specifically mentions that founders make the elm root broth when the roots are “sappy”, does this mean that the liquid produced by boiling the two together is particularly viscous? Why would viscosity even be that useful in producing an effective sand in which to cast? These were some of the many questions we had when we began our recreation of this recipe. In a much more abstract sense, we were aware as we debated the structure of our experiments that we were deeply enmeshed in questions of scientific and practical authority. To that end, we also wanted to ask: what about our experiments would be based on the authority of the author-practitioner, on our instructors and the prior knowledge of our peers, and our own experience? What could our work tell us about the nature of authority and experimentation in an early modern laboratory or workshop?
Elm Root and Wine Decoction
The first step in creating the elm root broth was sourcing our elm roots, which proved a particular challenge to our desire for authenticity in our replication of the manuscript’s recipes. Firstly, the harvesting of the elm roots for this recipe is seasonally contingent. In a recipe for “Magistry” on fol. 87v of the manuscript, the author states that “Founders harvest the roots of a young elm when it is sappy, and boil it in wine, or better yet vinegar”. Sap flow occurs during spring, as a result of changes in root pressure stimulated by temperature variations. Luckily, as we were conducting these experiments in April, we were perfectly positioned to collect fresh elm roots to use in our broth.
Initially, the elm we settled on for our recipe was Ulmus americana, which Prof. Smith located in the New York Botanical Garden and arranged for the harvesting of; however, as its binomial name suggests, this species is native to eastern North America, and therefore would not have been the type of elm to which the author-practitioner is referring in our manuscript. However, Deanna F. Curtis, Curator of Woody Plants at the New York Botanical Garden, suggested via email that an elm hybrid cultivar known as ‘Pioneer’ (binomial Ulmus x hollandica), might be more suitable for our purposes: as the Pioneer clone is formed by the crossing of two European species, Ulmus glabra (or Wych Elm) and Ulmus minor (the Smooth-leaved Elm), it probably more closely approximated the elms from which our craftsman would have sourced his roots than did the Ulmus americana. We decided, therefore, that in the interests of authenticity it would be better to use the Pioneer hybrid for our experimentation.
We were also provided with some elm roots that had been harvested from Wave Hill, and were from a modern species of European elm. Visually, these roots contrasted hugely with those of the Pioneer elm: while the Wave Hill roots were thick and sturdy, almost resembling branches, the roots of the Pioneer hybrid were very fine and delicate (Fig. 1 – cut ‘Pioneer’ elm roots).
The first roots we experimented with boiling were the Wave Hill roots sourced by Wayne Morris, Assistant Director of Horticulture at Tree Man. Cutting them down into a suitable size was actually a relatively intimidating process: the roots were much larger than we expected! Using a handsaw, I cut three of the root pieces into fairly large segments, each around 3-4 inches in length. (In retrospect, I think that we might have achieved more notable results if we had cut them into smaller pieces, increasing the surface area to volume ratio of the roots and thereby increasing the likelihood of sap being exposed to and interacting with the wine). Although we had initially been skeptical about how ‘sappy’ the roots were (this is, after all, the defining quality designated by the manuscript), when we began to handle them they started to feel more and more malleable, and our fingers were certainly picking up a sticky residue from the cutting process.
After we felt we probably had a sufficient amount of roots at our disposal, we measured out 500ml of our chosen wine (a cheap Cabernet Sauvignon – the manuscript, after all, says that vinegar is an even “better” medium than wine in which to boil the elm roots.) into a metal pan, added 250g of elm roots, and placed the pan, uncovered, on a hotplate to boil (Fig. 2 – elm roots ready to be boiled in wine). No quantities are noted in the manuscript, in the various places where elm-root-and-wine broth is suggested as a wet binder; we extrapolated, therefore, that this might be the type of recipe for which judgement by eye is an adequate means of measurement. In particular, we were interested to see how the decoction would end up in terms of consistency, as last semester an experiment was done to produce the same binder but using slippery elm inner bark powder rather than fresh elm roots. The experimenters reported that boiling one cup of wine with two teaspoons of elm bark powder resulted in a very viscous liquid with a mucilaginous texture similar to that of albumen.1 However, we did not have a similar experience when boiling the fresh elm roots. The wine reduced to a fifth (around 100ml) in the space of about 20-30 minutes of boiling, on the highest setting of the hot plate. Although the mixture certainly seemed more viscous, it was hard to tell if this was a quality imparted by the elm roots per se, or if this was simply the result of the wine’s reduction – and while the mixture could feasibly be described as viscous, it was certainly not of jelly-like texture. Nevertheless, we strained the wine broth through a sieve into a jug, and then stored the mixture in a glass container in the lab fridge (although, given that the recipe for elm roots boiled in wine on fol. 87v states that founders “prepare a years’ worth of it and store it in a cask”, it would probably have done just as well sat inside a fume hood, or on a shelf in the lab).
Ironically, boiling the Pioneer elm roots was an even less successful endeavour. After washing the roots thoroughly, we cut them into small pieces and placed them in a pan with the same amount of wine as used before (500ml) – and, again, the boiling process lasted for around 20-30 minutes. However, the mixture that resulted from this experiment did not have even the viscosity of the first broth. Perhaps this was due to the nature of these small, new elm roots: when handling them, we found them to be quite brittle and twig-like, and certainly not anywhere near as sappy in texture as the Wave Hill roots. We considered that perhaps a longer boiling time was required to allow the heat to break down the elm roots, but boiling the Pioneer roots in two more trials, once for two hours, and once for 6-½ hours2, seemed to produce no increased viscosity in the resultant liquid.
Our lack of success with the Pioneer elm roots led us to consider a larger question about the difference in taxonomic ordering between the early modern period and the present day. To wit, we were interested in the qualities that were selected for in present-day tree hybridization. While our author-practitioner seems to foreground properties or “virtues” of trees and plants (in this case, the sappiness of the elm roots) as their most important aspects, we suspected that morphological traits such as leaf size and shape might underpin the process of modern-day hybridization. In this case, the Pioneer elm roots, while a hybrid of the European Ulmus glabra and Ulmus minor, might have been produced in the aim of recreating morphology rather than properties. Prof. Smith contacted the garden historian and curator at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia Joel T. Fry with this question, to which he gave a particularly fulsome and illuminating response. While sixteenth-century herbalists, artists, and craftspeople were interested in plants that “produced useful chemicals or compounds”, Fry stated that “[m]odern, intentional hybridization of trees is mostly for some limited number of benefits. Something like dwarf size, a certain color, no fruit, no thorns, fast growth, or ease of propagation by cuttings. In the case of the ‘Pioneer’ elm it looks like fast growth, and perhaps some resistance to Dutch elm disease were what they were looking for. Certainly, gooey sap from the roots would be one of the last things they were looking for”.3 Given that tree hybridization now seeks to produce specimens that are fast-growing and profitable, according to Fry, it seems very likely that a property like root sappiness could have been lost in the process.
We decided that to create our sand, we would use the broth produced from boiling the Wave Hill roots in our first experiment, and the broth produced from boiling the Pioneer hybrid for 20-30 minutes. As these two experiments had been conducted under identical conditions, using the same equipment and the same wine, we thought this would minimise the potential of interference from external factors, whilst still allowing us to compare the ‘authentic’ elm product with the ‘less authentic’.
Preparing the Sand
For the dry component of our sand, we had two options: a commercial ash and a non-commercial ash produced by calcining bovine foot bones in the lab kiln last semester. We decided that we would produce an ‘authentic’ sand (made by combining the non-commercial ash with the Pioneer elm root broth) and an ‘inauthentic’ sand (a mixture of the commercial ash and the Wave Hill root decoction); so as to compare a sand that would be as close as possible to that used by our author-practitioner, with a sand that made use of modern amenities and short-cuts (i.e., the commercial ash) and non-contemporary materials (the elm species that would not have been present in early modern Europe).
The two experiments we performed — one which we perceived as true as possible to the materials with which our author-practitioner would have practised his craft, and one which we saw as cleaving slightly less closely to historical context — can be situated in the distinction that Hasok Chang makes (developing on the work of Dietmar Hőttecke) between ‘historical’ replication of experiments, and ‘physical’ replication. Historical replication, Chang explains, seeks to match as closely as possible the instruments and substances that would have been employed in past recipes; physical replication, by contrast, utilises “any convenient instruments and procedures that will help one create the phenomena of interest, and faithfulness to the details of the experiment is of secondary interest”.4 The “philosophical challenge” of the latter, Chang asserts, is “not in the verification of the exactness of repetition, but in the characterization of the phenomena to be replicated”.5 Chang’s division of experimentation of this sort into two distinct categories, neither of which is superior or inferior to the other, was useful, in that it helped us to look beyond a restrictive binary of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ experimentation, and instead see both of our experiments as seeking to replicate the activities of the author-practitioner in different, non-hierarchical aspects.
Although the process of sandcasting is detailed in various other areas in the manuscript, the particular recipe for ox foot bone and elm root broth sand does not specify any particular method for combining the wet and dry elements, nor does it give any sense of the texture that the ideal sand for casting will possess. We therefore relied on two things in the mixing of our sand: textual sources, including not only the manuscript but other contemporary works detailing artisanal practices; and our past experience in sandcasting. In fact, we had previously worked on creating a sand from pine ash and wine from fol. 93r, the process of which was very similar to what we expected to do with this recipe; we therefore had a good sense of what procedure we needed to follow, and a set of ingredient measurements on which we could base our new experiment.6
One of the first questions we had was, just how wet did the sand need to be? What kind of texture should the sand possess? Contemporary technical literature assisted us in understanding the desired consistency of the sand. In the eighth book of Vannoccio Biringuccio’s metallurgical treatise Pirotechnia (1540), in a chapter entitled ‘Various methods of Making Powders in Which to Cast Bronzes in the Small Art of Casting’, Biringuccio stipulates that sand for this type of casting should ‘stick together’ if you squeeze it in the palm.
A loam is made from these and mixed by beating with wool-cloth cuttings, spent washed ashes, and horse dung. This is made into cakes and dried. These are then put to bake in a furnace or in some other way and, in fact, one baked very well. Then it is pounded and sifted with a fine sieve, as it is ground in a potter’s color mill, or by hand on a porphyry with water, to the fineness that the craftsman desires, or as fine as he can make it. When it has been ground it is again drained free from water and dried out with fire. Then as much magistery of salt is taken as will moisten it. It is dried and pounded again and passed through a sieve. When it has been made as desired in this way it is moistened again before use with water, urine, or vinegar just enough so that it holds together when it is squeezed in the fist. Then, when it has been brought to this point, it is moulded as you will hear.7
To determine the texture of our ash without any added moisture, we tried squeezing it in our fists according to Biringuccio’s method. Although both the ashes actually did stick together a little (indeed, much more than we had expected), it was clear that neither would function as a sand without the addition of the elm root binder.
In our previous experiments with sandcasting in pine ash and wine, we found that very little wet binder was needed to moisten the dry part of the sand: in fact, we only used 20ml of wine to one cup of ash. Since the bone ash and elm root broth recipe was so similar to the one we had performed earlier in the semester, we decided to begin this experiment using the same ratio of ingredients. We decided to make up the ‘inauthentic’ sand first, comprised of the commercial ash and the elm root broth derived from boiling the Wave Hill roots. As there was only half a cup of commercial ash available to us, we measured out 10ml of the elm root broth, which we would add little by little into the ash.
We began mixing the two ingredients by hand in a plastic mixing bowl, adding the wine periodically in very tiny volumes (a few milliliters per addition) and working it into the ash as if we were kneading a very dry dough. Very quickly it became apparent that the mixture was coming together: however, we decided that after adding the 10ml of wine we had measured out, a little more was needed to fully bind the sand. We therefore portioned out another 10ml of the broth, and after working this into the ash we felt that we had a sand with a good enough texture in which to mould – the sand was moist enough to stick together when squeezed in the fist, but it didn’t feel wet in any way (Fig. 3 – clumping commercial bone ash). The addition of the red elm root broth to the white commercial ash produced sand of a beautiful to shell-pink colour, as our illustration shows. This figure also demonstrates how the mixture clumped to our satisfaction according to our lab’s “squeeze test,” which we were taught to use with all types of sandcasting.
Our more authentic ingredients, however, did not combine in the same way. One cup of non-commercial ash required the addition of 70ml of wine in order to produce a suitable sand for casting, over three times the amount of liquid binder required for the commercial ash (and indeed three times as much as required for the pine ash in our previous sandcasting work). As we were working the sand, we found that it felt much coarser that the commercial ash; in fact, it felt similar to beach sand. This was presumably because the calcination process had not been fully completed, and some impurities remained in the ash. But why would we need to add so much more wine than our previous sand had required?
The answer to this may lie in the distinction between ‘lean’ and ‘fatty’ sands that the manuscript articulates. In this binary, ‘lean’ is typically referred to sands that are dry and crumbly, while ‘fatty’ designates sands that clump together easily (for example, on fol. 84v, the same page on which the recipe for ox hoof and elm root sand appears, the author claims that “[a] fat sand…sticks together neatly”).8 Most relevant, though, is the passage on fol. 69r, which states the following:
Lean sand needs to be more moistened than others, that’s to say with magistra or good pure wine or wine boiled with elm tree roots or something similar. But very fine sands, like burned linen which is fat and soft of its own accord, want to be applied dry.
Adopting the author-practitioner’s terminology, we can characterize the very fine commercial ash as ‘fat and soft’, and the non-commercial ash as ‘lean’, and therefore in need of more moistening than a ‘fatty’ sand.
Molding and Casting
Once our sands were clumping properly, we set about the process of molding. We used small mason jar lids as our ‘box’ molds, since we had so little of each type of our bone ash. Our first attempt was to mold a simple shape (a key) in the commercial ash; though it pressed well, it was very difficult to get the key back out of the surface without completely disturbing it. We therefore switched to two different objects which were rounded and much deeper than the key: a round, knobbled earring, and a medallion with the raised impression of a bird. The bird was pressed into the commercial ash and the earring into the lab-produced ash, and each was easy to remove from their respective molds (Fig 4. – medallion molded in commercial bone ash mixture ; and Fig. 5 – earring molded in lab ash mixture).
Our metal was then heated in a crucible; it was a 50%-50% alloy of lead and tin which is commonly used in our lab.9 We tested the heat of the metal with a piece of paper, choosing to skim and pour the alloy when the paper turned a deep brown upon being immersed in the paper.10 We poured the alloy, then let it sit to cool for approximately fifteen minutes. We did not use a separator on either mold.11
We were frankly astonished by the clarity of both casts when we broke them (very easily, clearly no release agent required) out of the molds. Both had picked up a great amount of detail, and the commercial ash in particular had produced an exceptionally smooth surface on our cast bird medallion. The cast of the earring had noticeable stippling in it which we assumed was a product of the relative coarseness of the lab ash sand; that being said, even the detail of that coarseness was fine and rendered in tiny, perfect detail (Fig. 6 – medallion cast in lead-tin alloy, commercial ash mixture ; and Fig. 7 – earring cast in lead-tin alloy, lab ash mixture). Anecdotally, both types of ash seemed to produce a finer cast than the calcined alabaster experiments going on in the lab at the same time, which had also made a cast of the bird medallion.
The Question of ‘Authority’
One of our key questions in performing these experiments was to think through the implications of using prior knowledge, and indeed prior materials, both in the context of our lab and that of the creation of scientific and artisanal knowledge. We took advantage of a wealth of different sources of authority:
- Our lab-produced bovine foot bone ash was produced last semester by a previous generation of Making and Knowing Project students. (Their process is detailed in their annotation, “Ox Bone and Rock Salt,” fol. 89r.) The final distilled product of their work provided us with a certain materialization of knowledge which we could rely on as a material, which was the result of much previous experimentation.
- Our knowledge of how to mold shapes in sand came in large part from our own previous experience with sandcasting earlier in the semester with pine ash and wine, which in turn was in part built on the previous cohort’s experiments with similar processes based on descriptions in BnF Ms Fr 640. In preparing our molds we were bringing to bear our own physical experience, the textual and verbal instructions of our peers and teachers as well as, of course, the author-practitioner, and indeed the collected materials of the lab (our pressed medallions, the oft-used lid molds, etc).
- Our metal alloy was one suggested by our resident master craftsman, Andrew Lacey, and was enthusiastically taken up by all of our student groups on multiple occasions. The question of whether this alloy was appropriate for all of our manuscript’s metal-related recipes – some of which mention specific metals to pour and others of which do not – recently came up in a lab session, and again the weight of authority, lab habits, accumulated experience, and the fact that the lab had accumulated a good supply of 50/50 lead-tin alloy ingots won out in those cases where the prescribed alloy was in doubt (including in our own experiment).
- Our elm roots were provided by expert staff from the New York Botanical Gardens who were able to pinpoint the likely genetic makeup of a period-appropriate species of tree, harvest the roots, and preserve them in order to transport them to us. If this conversation had not been initiated by Prof. Smith, it is highly unlikely that we would have been able to determine a precise genetic lineage, or indeed a lineage of ‘properties,’ which could have determined with any certainty what type of modern elm species would have been most similar to an elm in sixteenth-century France, and therefore would have provided the ‘correct’ roots to use.12
The nature of authority in the propagation of ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’ as big-name categories of inquiry is a topic of interest among historians of science and technology, albeit in various forms – either overt, or implied. In abstract senses, the privilege of authority in knowledge production has also been equated exactly with the establishment of “procedures of science”13 and a concomitant decline in the authority of religious or sacred knowledge as it, too, might pertain to practical knowledge – a distinction which, given the multiplicity of religious references which aid in the production of objects in our manuscript and others (see our annotation on powder for hourglasses for mention of the pater noster and methods of timekeeping, for example) – seems easily undermined.
There is no doubt that the form and interpersonal hierarchy of the workshop, however, in both its early modern and modern forms, plays a role in establishing the source of authority, power, or skilled/expert practice in the master craftsman. In workshops as described from the illustrations of Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia to Erin O’Connor’s article on glassblowing in New York City, both craft/scientific knowledge and the accumulated capital of artistic production (the workshop itself, its tools, its instruments, its machines, its accessibility) lie in the hands of the master craftsman. Cennino Cennini, in his Il libro dell’Arte, establishes his own merit as an artisan on his painstakingly detailed artistic heritage:
“I, Cennino, the son of Andrea Cennini of Colle di Val d’Elsa, -[I was trained in this profession for twelve years by my master, Agnolo di Taddeo of Florence; he learned this profession from Taddeo, his father; and his father was christened under Giotto, and was his follower for four-and-twenty years; and that Giotto changed the profession of painting from Greek back into Latin, and brought it up to date; and he had more finished craftsmanship than anyone has had since]…”14
It is not difficult to see a new type of the formalized master-apprentice artisanal relationships of the sixteenth century at work in our modern laboratory, both in terms of materials and embodied knowledge (for Taddeo and Giotto, see Prof. Smith and Mr. Lacey). In many respects, then, our experiment could be considered to be largely the work of others. We wish here to (for the moment) mainly plant the idea that the gratitude, certainty, and sudden clarity provided by all of these sources of authority rendered our experiments relatively much simpler compared to what they might have had to be had we been starting from scratch. This also, however, may eventually lead us to some concrete conclusions both about the nature of the scientific/artisanal workspace,
1 See the Fall 2014 annotation on sands and binders by Julianna van Visco and Emogene Schilling.
2 Trial conducted by Pamela Smith on May 3, 2015 with 250 ml poor quality red wine and 945 ml unfiltered, live apple cider vinegar boiled for 6-½ hours with a good handful of elm roots.
3 Joel T. Fry, email correspondence, 5/10/2015. Fry also informed us that several other trees/plants besides the elm were also valued for their ‘gooey’ roots: types of hibiscus were cultivated (and had been, for quite some time) for their mucilaginous root extracts, and the marshmallow (Althea officinalis) was grown in Europe and its roots boiled to make a goo.
4 Hasok Chang, “How Historical Experiments Can Improve Scientific Knowledge and Science Education: The Cases of Boiling Water and Electrochemistry”, Science and Education, 20, 3 (2011): 317-341 (320).
5 Chang, “How Historical Experiments Can Improve Scientific Knowledge and Science Education”, 320.
6 The recipe for tree ash as a sandcasting medium is as follows: ”La cendre blanche de tout boys qui se tient encores au boys<lb/> qui brusle et nest point tombee au bo foyer moule fort net” (“The white ash of all kinds of wood, which still sticks to the wood while burning, and which has not fallen into the hearth, molds very clean”). We used ash from pine wood roasted in a wood stove from California, and the ash was collected from the bottom of the stove after having fallen from the wood. The sand called for in the various casting recipes in the Ms. Fr. 640 is described as fine and pulverised, and on the same fol. is another ‘sable’ recipe which involves the use of soot, suggesting that the tree ash needs to be of a very fine, talcum-powder-like texture. We found that the ash required very little liquid binder to render it suitable to mould an object in (only 20ml of wine), but the cast object did not exhibit a particularly high level of detail. See our field notes on the experiment: http://making-and-knowing.wikischolars.columbia.edu/Wax+carving+and+plaster+moulding+field+notes and http://making-and-knowing.wikischolars.columbia.edu/Marris+-+Wax+Molding+and+Sandcasting.
7 Vannoccio Biringuccio, The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio, trans. and eds. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: Dover Publications, 1990), 324.
8 French translation: “Un sable gras…se rend si uny faict soufler”.
9 This became common after initial casting in cuttlefish bones, according to fol. 53r as an alloy to use in lead cuttlefish bone casting. “According to some it is mixed, half tin and half lead and, in order to heat it, a little arsenic is mixed in. It is cast well in small sizes in a cuttlefish bone, provided it is good.”
10 This test is described in fol. 145r, where the author-practitioner describes how to dip paper into molten tin or lead in order to test that it is not heated to too high a temperature. “Do not cast tin or lead too hot, because it would burn the bone & become lumpy. And to know when it is the right temperature, dip a little piece of paper in it. If it turns black without catching fire, it is the right temperature. But if it burns & makes a fire, it is too hot.”
11 Our recipe did not mention the use of a separator, but such ingredients are common in other instructions for casting throughout the manuscript. One example is in cuttlefish bone casting, where it is recommended (on fol. 91r) that one uses charcoal dust.
12 A lively discussion is currently ongoing between scholars of the Making and Knowing Project and botanical experts as to the difference between 16th-century and modern understandings of taxonomy and the properties of the plant materials which are mentioned as ingredients in the author-practitioner’s manuscript. A major difficulty which has come up in this conversation is the gulf between modern practices of determining a plant’s taxonomy by its genetic features versus the categorization of visible or chemical properties determined by pre-genetic scientists and artisans. We thank Prof. Smith and Joel T. Fry, Curator of the John Bartram Garden in Philadelphia, for starting this discussion.
13 Will Wright, Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 23-24; emphasis added.
14 Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’Arte, trans. Daniel V. Thompson Jr. (New York: Dover, 1933), 2.