Angular or rounded? Medieval script reveals not only what the author wrote, but when and where the book was made.
Dr. Erik Kwakkel
Go on, judge a book by its sound. The thinner the parchment, the higher the pitch—and the price.
Listening to the medieval book
This 1000-year-old math primer is nothing fancy, but it took months for a scribe to make.
A medieval textbook
At medieval universities, students took notes on parchment scraps, sometimes bound together with cord.
Medieval notepads
Manuscript readers tracked marginal comments with dots, lines, letters, and numbers—anticipating the footnote.
The medieval origins of the modern footnote
From cupboard shelfmarks to bookcase inventories, medieval readers devised codes for locating precious volumes.
Finding books
Lose your place? Not in a monastic library. Static or dynamic, “spider,” or wheel, these bookmarks stay put.
Smart bookmarks
Scribes left plenty of empty space, but readers often filled the margins with comments—and even little hands.
Getting personal in the margins
A carousel, a wheel, or a portable desk? Reading multiple books at once required ample space and custom furniture.
The medieval desktop
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Using the book: an introduction
Animal skin lent a durable writing surface to medieval scribes. When tanned and tooled, it also protected books.
Medieval books in leather (and other materials)
Is that a body, or a book? Arms, hands, feet, skulls—all can feature in the anatomy of a medieval manuscript.
Clasps: hugging a medieval book
Medieval libraries hid a forest in their shelves—wood boards, covered and clasped, protected precious parchment.
Binding the book
Decorators drew inspiration from design books, from enlarged capitals to elaborate figures in the margins.
Medieval supermodels
From penwork and gilding to one-letter stories, decorators offered a range of services to dazzle medieval readers.
Decorating the book
Like modern marketers, medieval scribes advertised on posters and even inserted “spam” pages into texts.
Making books for profit in medieval times
Caroline Minuscule, the main script of the early Middle Ages, was replaced by Gothic—and later, “Times Roman.”
Words, words, words: medieval handwriting
Long before ruled notebooks hit the shelves, medieval writers lined, laid out, and folded their own parchment.
The work of the scribe
Prime cuts, or strips? Scribes weren’t butchers, but they did cut skin and pick out different grades of parchment.
Skins and scraps
Not all medieval cows went to heaven—some ended up in books. Hair follicles and holes offer clues to a page’s past.