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I love the last page of the medieval book. Not because it means that my research of a particular manuscript is almost completed, but because the last page often provides information pertaining ...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2014/08/21/the-last-page-of-the-medieval-book/

While our eyes are naturally drawn to pages filled with color and gold, those without decoration can be equally appealing. Indeed, even damaged goods – mutilated bindings, torn pages, parchment...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2014/05/02/the-beauty-of-the-injured-book/

It is the evening of Thursday 27 February, 2014, and at the moment I am sitting in The White Horse being stared at by Inspector Morse, who frequented this pub back in the day – and who seems to...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2014/02/28/my-week-of-lecturing-in-oxford/

The past few days I have been preoccupied with a deceptively simple question: “What is the oldest book in the world?” Having done some looking around I can now report that while somewhere on ...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/12/20/what-is-the-oldest-book-in-the-world/

This blog connects to two earlier entries in medievalfragments: Irene O’Daly’s recent blog on how scribes are depicted in medieval art (here); and Jenneka Janzen’s assessment of how we are ...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/11/05/where-are-the-scriptoria/

This blog entry focuses on a book fragment I encountered in Leiden University Library earlier this week while studying twelfth-century material with my research team. As discussed in an earlier b...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/09/24/stamp-of-approval-a-paper-snippet-and-the-inquisition/

This is the first part of a series highlighting instances where medieval individuals added information to an existing book, either right after its production or centuries later. What precisely di...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/06/21/voices-on-the-medieval-page-1-the-reader/

On my Tumblr I recently posted two entries devoted to a remarkable discovery made in the Book History class I am co-teaching with Paul Hoftijzer for the Book and Digital Media Studies programme ...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/05/03/a-hidden-medieval-archive-surfaces/

The novelist L.P. Hartley once said that the past is like a foreign country: things are done different there. What I find most remarkable about the bookish slice of medieval society that I study ...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/04/15/making-books-for-profit-in-medieval-times/

When I started this post I set out to answer a very simple query: what is the oldest photograph we have of a real reader interacting with a medieval manuscript? The quest was sparked by a 19th-ce...

https://medievalbooks.nl/2013/03/01/the-proud-reader-showing-off-the-medieval-manuscript/