Beasts to Craft (B2C) has established biocodicology as a new discipline, harnessing biomolecular techniques to unlock the biological information encoded in parchment manuscripts. From its inception, the project set out to map regional and temporal patterns of animal species and production quality in parchment, to develop truly non-invasive methods for analysing proteins, lipids, DNA and isotopes, and to apply these innovations to questions of manuscript provenance, craft practice and use history. By integrating proteomics, genomics, chemistry and digital cataloguing, B2C transformed our understanding of medieval animal husbandry, manuscript manufacture and the intricate relationships between human culture and the biological materials upon which it relied.
Across the project’s lifetime, more than 7 000 parchment samples spanning the sixth to sixteenth centuries were analysed using eZooMS peptide mass fingerprinting. A high-throughput MALDI-TOF MS/MS pipeline, coupled with the open-source Bacollite software, enabled rapid, automated species identification at unprecedented scale, revealing distinct geographic and chronological trends—for example, the marked rise of sheep parchment in English legal texts from the twelfth century, and characteristic Cistercian workshop signatures in northern France. In parallel, the team developed the Parchment Glutamine Index (PQI) and enhanced the DeamiDATE software to quantify site-specific deamidation patterns, yielding proxies for lime-exposure and processing intensity that permit reconstruction of quire assemblies and the standardisation of manufacturing protocols across monastic networks. A novel solvent-based protocol now permits extraction of skin lipids without visible damage, and compound-specific stable-isotope and radiocarbon analyses on minute lipid fractions have demonstrated the retention of primary isotopic signals, opening new avenues for provenance and dating studies. Improvements in DNA extraction have produced high-quality host and microbial sequences from over 120 manuscripts, allowing the identification of breed-specific retroviral markers for geographic “postcoding” and the detection of preserved livestock pathogens such as sheep-pox virus DNA. Building on a landmark study of a medieval English birthing girdle, B2C extended proteomic mapping of stains and wear across ten devotional manuscripts, identifying human-derived proteins and residues of honey, milk and egg, and thereby delivering direct evidence of liturgical and medical practices. Fourteen international workshops facilitated the integration of biomolecular data with codicological and digital manuscript catalogues, and a publicly accessible database now houses over 50 000 mass spectra for cross-institutional research and machine-learning applications.
