MEMBER INFORMATION
Élodie Lévêque is an associate professor in Book and Paper Conservation at the Sorbonne University, a member of the Beast to Craft ERC project and of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT/CNRS) . She previously worked as a Senior Conservator at the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin and the Montpellier University Library. She graduated with a Master's in Book Conservation from the Sorbonne in 2010 and completed a PhD in Medieval Studies in 2020 (Paris University), researching medieval bindings from the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux. Her research focuses on Medieval parchment and leather that were used to manufacture manuscripts.
ABM CONFERENCES
Poster Presenter
Exploring the origin and provenance of medieval manuscripts from the collection of Clairvaux abbey using a biocodicological approach
Team Presenter
Hiding in plain sight: The biomolecular identification of seal use in Romanesque medieval manuscripts
ABM MEMBER EVENTS
PUBLICATIONS + PROJECTS
Sarah Fiddyment, Matthew D. Teasdale, Jiří Vnouček, Élodie Lévêque, Annelise Binois & Matthew J. Collins
So you want to do biocodicology? A field guide to the biological analysis of parchment
Biocodicology, the study of the biological information stored in manuscripts, ofers 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.