La pergamena: appunti per un’anamnesi della memoria ‘animale’

This essay reflects on parchment as a primary and paradigmatic medium of medieval written memory, interpreting it as a material, symbolic, and semiotic threshold between writing and image, function and meaning. By framing parchment as a form of “animal memory,” the author situates the medieval codex and documentary cover within a longue durée history of writing materials, contrasting vegetal and mineral supports with the animal substrate that dominated between Late Antiquity and the late Middle Ages. The discussion moves beyond technical considerations to explore the cultural, theological, and symbolic implications of parchment, understood as both sacrifice and guarantee of memory, preservation, and authority. Particular attention is devoted to the reused parchment covers of communal registers, where heraldic signs, marginal drawings, pen trials, and erratic inscriptions transform archival objects into dense palimpsests of signs. These surfaces are read as spaces of semantic excess, where legal validation, visual rhetoric, and individual expression intersect. Through dialogue with semiotic theory and art history, the essay ultimately proposes parchment as an “empire of signs,” capable of bridging medieval documentary culture and contemporary artistic practices, and of challenging linear, period-based narratives of art and writing.