black-ink recipes

Ingredients

vitriolic components, carbon, plant of iron-gall

Preparation Steps

Original Recipe Text

The replication involves black-ink recipes extracted from five Arabic technical treatises spanning the 9th to 13th centuries. The process aims to 'establish the ratios of vitriolic components in iron-gall inks and to determine the co-presence of carbon and iron-gall inks' (p. 304). It utilizes experimental analysis to clarify terminology, variants, and mistakes in the transmission process (p. 305).

Evidence

"It takes into account the same Arabic treatises of the previous chapter but adopts an experimental approach. In particular, it describes several cases of replication of black-ink recipes to exemplify the potentialities of this methodology"

Remarks

The study uses replication to prove or disprove the veracity of the instructional sentence 'I tried it and it is really good', which conventionally introduced ink recipes in premodern Arabic manuscripts (p. 305). The research area for these treatises ranges from al-Andalus to Iraq (p. 305).