The surviving portion touches mainly on the finishing of the skins, which the anonymous artisan sees in terms of their texture, contour, and tactile quality: “Then you shall wipe it and write on it…When you see that it is shriveled you shall polish it and write on it…If it be one that is all in wrinkles…If it be one that has a corroded skin, you shall scrape it well with the hard pumice and write on it with a fine reed…If it be one that is sticky, you shall pumice it with the soft sort and shall not wipe it at all.” The term translated here as “corroded skin,” ouamshaar, is a Coptic compound formed from ouam (a verbal adjective meaning “eater,” from the verb ouōm, “to eat”) and shaar, “skin.” A “skineater,” then, is the organic agent responsible for corroding the surface of the membrane. Even the earliest examples contain enough technical information to give a good sense of certain elements of the practice and often loving attunement to detail, as in a recipe or set of guidelines in Coptic compiled in a papyrus codex of the sixth or seventh century. This makes them no less relevant as testaments to the assumptions and cultural sensibilities with which the lineaments and hands-on technicalities of this craft work are described.

Most of the scattered recipes and directions found in medieval sources should be regarded less as specialized instructions than as schematic formulas, their aim more to describe than to teach the craft. While they might prescribe a bath of water and lime for the flayed hides, for instance, they rarely specify even approximate proportions of each and provide little detailed information about the proper techniques for stretching, scraping, and finishing the rendered skins what detail they do convey will often be incomprehensible to modern scholars and makers.

As modern-day makers who have tried them will be the first to say, however, such instructions can be surprisingly unhelpful when it comes to the specific hands-on elements of the craft. Paleographers and historians of the book have often characterized these instructions as detailed and pragmatic. The recipes and instructions for the making of parchment that survive from the premodern world, while relatively few in number, are quite diverse in the sensibilities they bring to bear on the enterprise they describe.

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