The Valencia Institute for Conservation, Restoration and Research (IVCR+i) restored the other three books. 14th-century Court of Justice of Cocentaina collecting information about processes, penalties and judicial powers It’s about the town’s figure of justice.
These books let us know how justice was administered in Cocentaina in the 14th century, its administrative bodies and the executive branches of the municipal government. Justice did so judicial, civil and criminal judge, and they had to keep records of their activities, which were very diverse, from criminal proceedings with witness statements and sentences, liens for debts and sales. Therefore, this documentation allows us to approach information about the daily lives of protesters in the Middle Ages.
Restored books (Court of Justice 1303-1304, Court of Justice 1305 And Court of Justice 1303-1306) presented this afternoon by the director of IVCR+i at the Cocentaina Municipal Archive, Gemma Contreras, and by the mayor of Cocentaina, Mireia Estepa Olcina.
The Cocentaina Municipal Archive is one of the most important archives in the Community of Valencia, both in terms of the number of documents it contains and their age. In it we can find documents originating from municipal activities from 1269 to the present.
This action responds signed agreement In 2017, between the Cocentaina City Council and the IVCR+i, who determined that three copies of this collection were conditioned to recover different manuscript volumes kept in the Municipal Archive each year.
restoration process
The intervention was carried out on three books covered with flexible parchment, possibly reused, with and without covers. Paper stands out, which is The kind called Andalusian paper, It is produced by hand, by very primitive crushing of flax rags into a paste and pasting with starch, so in its manufacture it is usual to find remnants of blue thread from crushed fabrics. There is no watermark on the paper sheets.
Andalusian paper has a satiny or even glossy appearance when in good condition, but in this case Dull and cottony due to loss of strength under the influence of microorganisms. Featured parchment volumes dirt, flaking, missing, dryness and folds. The spine was deformed and lost its suture function.
The restoration consisted of: cleaning parchment caps with antifungalsAnd reintegration of shortcomings With Japanese paper and chromatically with watercolor. The body of the book was dry cleaned and then soaked with a hydroalcoholic solution on a suction table, the cottony areas fixed with a highly diluted wheat starch spray.
After the drying process of the pre-consolidated areas, the document writing was made legible by reinforcing with rewettable low weight Japanese paper prepared with wheat starch. The grafts were made from pulp of a similar color. The booklets were re-stitched with the same joining system they originally had. Finally, some protection boxes have been made to protect them from spoiling factors.