Discontinuous reading | 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 third episode, she discusses how scribes adapted their manuscripts to facilitate discontinuous reading.
Early medieval reading was often ‘intensive’. A monk in his cell could perform the lectio divina for months on end with just one book, reading it slowly, from cover to cover, contemplating the meaning of each and every word.

The scholarly reading of teachers and students in cathedral schools and universities was different: it focused on intertextuality, used more texts, but not necessarily entire texts. The same with devotional reading in breviaries and books of hours. Gradually this ‘extensive’, discontinuous reading was facilitated by clever navigation tools. Scribes included lists of books, chapters or pericopes (LTK 243 I) at the front of the codex, indexes at the back, and combined them with a foliation; added running titles in the top margin (BPL 59) and rubrics in the outer margins (BPL 59, LTK 243 I); attached bookmarks to the edge of important pages (BPL 2001).

Explore these manuscripts (held by Leiden University Libraries) yourself:
BPL 2001: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:269...
BPL 59: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:315...
LTK 243 I: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:217...

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.