Marco Palma

SUMMARY: The library built in the mid-15th century by the Lord of Cesena Malatesta Novello still preserves 343 manuscripts. 126 out of these codices were copied and illuminated for him. The activity of the Malatesta scriptorium covers a period of about twenty years, from 1446 to 1465, when Novello died. This corpus, consisting of manuscripts written in a relatively short period, and commissioned by the same person, represents an excellent field for researches in palaeography (scribes, handwriting, identification of anonymous copyists, and so on) and codicology (ruling, decoration, binding, and so forth). The present project aims at identifying one of the features of the parchment used in the scriptorium, by measuring the thickness of the leaves composing the quires of each manuscript. The collected data have been subjected to a basic statistical treatment and compared with the (unfortunately rare) similar data, drawn from contemporary or older manuscripts.