At medieval universities, students took notes on parchment scraps, sometimes bound together with cord.
Using the medieval book
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.
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