Le rôle du parchemin dans la miniaturisation de la Bible au XIIIe siècle

The 13th century portable bibles have always been admired for their very thin and high-quality parchment, but questions have also risen about the animal origin and the manufacturing techniques used for the production of their writing support. Various hypotheses have been put forward on this subject. This contribution tries to review the knowledge concerning this material, to identify the differences between the parchment of French, Italian and English origin and to estimate the number of skins that were used for this production. Finally, this paper evaluates the role of the thickness of the parchment, measured ins trumen tally on 93 manuscripts, in the miniaturisation process of the Bible in the 13th century.