A lot of medieval manuscripts survive only in fragments. There is indeed a whole field within medieval studies, fragmentology, dedicated to finding and studying such fragments. Some of the fragments are due to medieval and early modern monks (and nuns) reusing old parchment, some to modern antiquities dealers cutting up medieval manuscripts and selling them piece-meal. And that doesn't even include the damage parchment often suffered from floods, fire, and nibbling by rats or mice.
Parchment was valuable, regardless of what was written on it. Hence if a book or charter became outdated for some reason, there was a strong incentive to reuse the parchment. A confirmation from king or pope would of course be kept, but the records of donations by petty landowners to a monastery, or the final settling of a quarrel involving people now dead, would have little intrinsic value once the recording charter was copied into a cartulary. Similarly, if the liturgy had changed, old liturgical books would become useless.
The old parchment would especially be used in book binding. It would be cut into the appropriate shape and used especially as a backing for the boards of the cover or to shape the curve of the spine. The bookbinders would make no effort to erase what was written on the parchment. Scholars studying such fragments are always on the lookout for them in old bindings, though taking them out for closer examination is difficult if one does not want to mess up the book of which they are now a part.
Recently endoscopic cameras have been used to peek inside the gap between the outside of a bound book's spine and the inner part, where the individual gatherings of pages are sewn together. (Take an old hardcover book off your shelf and open it, and you'll see what I mean. Most modern books just glue the pages in, but older ones still sewed the so-called signatures as medieval bookbinders did.) Yes, this endoscopic camera, a tiny camera at the end of a flexible coil, is like what they use to give you a colonoscopy.
As well as monks themselves cutting up medieval manuscripts they considered useless, we have modern collectors providing a market for pieces of manuscripts considered lovely. There was a nineteenth-century craze for cutting out the illuminated initials from manuscripts and pasting them into scrapbooks.
More recently, art and antiquities dealers have recognized that a lot of people find the Middle Ages interesting and would be delighted to own a small part of it. A cut-up manuscript, sold page by page, yields a lot more revenue than selling a complete manuscript. Undecorated manuscripts may end up in a library, but religious manuscripts with interesting initials and colors are often cut up.
This is a page from a missal (a liturgical manuscript) I myself own. It's late medieval, probably from France or possibly Italy. It was given to my father many years ago, by one of his students, and there is no record of how it got to the (long ago closed) gift shop in upstate New York where it was purchased. Although I am now one of those owning such a fragment, I would never go out and buy one. The argument for doing so is too similar to, "But the snow leopard was already long dead when I bought the coat made from its fur."
One of the most famous missals to be cut up and sold as individual pages is the one from late medieval Beauvais (France). Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, is leading a project to try to find all the leaves (some are in libraries, some in private hands, some at universities) and create a "virtual" complete missal, images of all the pages in the right order. They really are lovely, more highly decorated than my missal page (which is not part of the Beauvais missal, I checked).
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
For more on medieval manuscripts, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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