TY - CONF A1 - Colini, Claudia T1 - The Interdisciplinary Alchemist: Reproduction and Study of Black Inks from the Islamicate World N2 - The identification of the materials constituting an artefact is the basis of any correct conservation project, for this reason (among others) in the last 50 years analytical techniques have been applied to the study of manuscripts. Unfortunately, the scientific investigation of Arabic books is still uncommon, focusing mainly on single case studies, often producing unclear results, especially for black inks. This lack of knowledge prompted a recent research in which black ink recipes have been collected from written Arabic sources on bookmaking, their feasibility has been assessed, and finally some of them have been reproduced. These samples were artificially aged and analysed through an array of analytical techniques, mostly non-invasive and non-destructive, in order to build a database of Arabic inks and their ingredients and also to verify the detection limits of the portable equipment employed. In this talk I will present some instances of how this approach can help textual criticism, for example in evaluating variants and determining the competence of authors and compilers. At the same time the research highlights how much this scientific work depends on textual studies, especially concerning the identification of ingredients. Moreover, I will focus on some of the problematics I faced both during the textual interpretation and the actual reproduction of the recipes and how they influenced the results of the scientific analyses. In particular I’ll look into the role played by the degree of purity of the components and the function (real and perceived) of some of the ingredients. T2 - International Medieval Conference 2019 CY - Leeds, UK DA - 01.07.2019 KW - Black Ink KW - Arabic Recipes KW - Interdisciplinary PY - 2019 AN - OPUS4-50114 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -