By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
Welcome to our new Friday Library volunteer, Laura Takens, who has embarked on a project to add online catalogue records for our collection of medieval manuscript fragments.
Before the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, books were copied by hand on parchment made from animal skin. When manuscripts fell out of use, they were dismantled and individual leaves were recycled in the bindings of later books.
Today, many of Exeter’s medieval manuscripts are held at other libraries, notably the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. However, we are fortunate that a good number of complete manuscripts remain at Exeter, including those commissioned by Bishop Grandisson in the 14th century and Bishop Lacy in the 15th century.
We are also fortunate in having an extensive collection of medieval manuscript fragments. Fragments are easily overlooked, but if properly identified and catalogued, they can provide evidence of medieval religious practice, education, literacy, art and music, and they can reveal information about the dissemination of texts and, later, of the book trade.
For some years, Fran Alvarez Lopez has been a familiar face in the Library, researching and identifying our medieval fragments. Some of you may recall his fascinating Annual Library Lecture in 2023, ‘Missing Pieces: Recycling the Libraries of the Past’, where he revealed some of the stories behind our fragment collection. Fran has even been able to reconnect fragments from manuscripts that have dispersed across collections – and even across Europe.
Laura is now adding Fran’s vital research to our online catalogue, recording physical features, scripts, decoration, provenance and textual contents. Each fragment has its own record, photograph and object number and several fragments appear on Fragmentarium, an international digital research platform dedicated to the study of medieval manuscript fragments. As research continues, it may be possible to virtually reconstruct medieval books that were broken apart and scattered across the world centuries ago.
Visit the Library’s online catalogue to search our collections: exeter-cathedral.org.uk/learning-collections/heritage-and-engagement/search-the-catalogue/
Discover more medieval manuscript fragments on Fragmentarium: fragmentarium.ms/