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The Genesis of a Medieval Manuscript

lquigley

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Binding:

After the assembly process was completed, the manuscript was ready to be bound.  Not all medieval manuscripts were bound in hard covers; in fact, some were allowed to remain in their loose-quire form without binding.  The midpoint between these two extremes was the loose parchment cover, which interestingly provided certain manuscripts with better protection than their stronger wooden brothers.  Graham and Clemens note that during the flood of the River Arno in Florence in 1966, "manuscripts with parchment covers survived in better condition than those with wooden covers because the parchment backing allowed the manuscript leaves to shrink and expand at the same rate as the cover" (50).  Still, most expensive medieval manuscripts were bound with wooden covers, in order to protect them as they sat on a shelf.

Wooden bindings followed a general procedure.  From Graham and Clemens' Introduction to Manuscript Studies:

  1. The quires would be sewn onto several cords generally made of leather.  A binder could use anywhere from two to five cords, depending on the size of the manuscript at hand.
  2. The ends of the cords would be fed into the wooden boards set to serve as the front and back covers of the manuscript.  The wooden boards would generally be oak in northern Europe and beech in southern Europe.  In order to avoid warping of the covers, the wood would be "quarter-sawn."  Graham and Clemens elaborate: "rather than takin ga round length of tree trunk and sawing straight across it, a section shaped like a slice of pie would first be cut from the trunk, and then boards would be cut from this section" (51).
  3. After this, the boards themselves would be covered with skin and potentially decorated.  Monastic libraries frequently used pigskin for this purpose, though calfskin and goatskin were also suitable to serve as binding covers.  Occasionally the leather would be decorated "either by stamping a design into it or by blind-tooling it," or "working a simple pattern into the leather with a hot metal tool" (Graham and Clemens 53).

Most manuscripts were given bindings to allow them to sit on a bookshelf -- horizontally, not vertically like modern bookshelves! -- but there were methods of binding designed to allow readers to wear the manuscript on his or her body. Girdle bookbinding was a brand of binding that "allowed the manuscript to be carried at the belt" (Graham and Clemens 55).  Here, the book cover extended past the edges of the manuscript pages as a flap or pouch and was tied in a knot at the end. This knot could then be slipped under a user's belt to allow the manuscript to dangle at the waist for easy access. These bindings were most common with Books of Hours and devotional texts (Graham and Clemens 55).


Below are examples of bound texts. To the left is an example of a girdlebound book; to the right, the cords used for binding are still visible in the inner margin.

Binding.
A girdlebound book.
NYPL Digital Gallery
Page of text with quire signature visible.
The binding is visible in the far right margin.
New York Public Library; MA 115
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