Bindings | Exploring the Medieval Manuscript Book

The video series ‘Exploring the Medieval Manuscript Book’ features book historian Irene O’Daly (Leiden University), introducing a wider audience to unique artefacts that were created with pen and ink in a distant past. In this sixth episode, she discusses medieval bindings.
The binding is the ‘outside’ protecting the words on the double leaves of the quires sewn together to form the bookblock. There are impressive medieval bindings with blind-tooled leather over wooden boards, with metal corners, bosses and clasps added for extra protection and status (BPL 3683). Simple bindings, on the other hand, just consist of a flexible parchment cover (BPL 3744). By the way, not every medieval binding is an original binding (BUR Q 1).
Medieval manuscript books that came down to us have had long and sometimes busy lives, leading to several rebindings, sometimes recklessly cutting the edges of a bookblock with severe loss of running titles or border decoration (LTK 294).
Frequently medieval and post-medieval books contain traces of ‘predecessors’: fragments of manuscripts that were deemed worthless. Its parchment leaves were cut up to serve as a cover, as flyleaves (BPL 88) or to protect the center fold of paper quires against damage from the sewing thread (BPL 16 B). Fragments are important, as they testify to the existence of text sources

Explore these manuscripts (held by Leiden University Libraries) yourself:
BPL 3744: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:217...
BPL 146: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:188...
BPL 3683: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:217...
BUR Q 1: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:270...
LTK 294: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:151...
BPL 16 B: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:884154
BPL 88: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:202...

This video is created for ‘The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ project which explores how medieval reading culture evolved and became a fundamental aspect of European culture. The project is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.
Project website: https://www.medieval-reads.eu.