Adding other objects to blank parchment

Medieval owners of books—especially of books of hours—used them to store small devotional objects, such as pilgrims’ badges, metal souvenirs from having taken the Eucharist, gifted loose images, and any other flattish objects that they wanted to remember, store and associate with a devotional context. Another item they sewed in was curtains. Sewing

curtains into books added opulence and value to manuscripts made, for example, at the Ottonian courts.⁵³ Small pieces of precious imported silk, made with subtle patterns woven according to unfathomably time-consuming procedures, could be stitched into a book both to protect the image below it and also to add the ritual of its unveiling to the procedures of reading the book.

Very few actual curtains survive in fifteenth-century books, but what does survive are the thousands of needle holes in parchment, in the marginal area above miniatures, which signal that someone once sewed a curtain there. To take one of dozens or hundreds of possible examples:

Cambridge UL, Ms. Ii.6.2, fol. 12v has a row of telltale holes above the pink canopy (fig. 7). With a cloth of honor hanging behind his head, and a physical curtain hanging in front of his face, Christ was encased in curtains, which could be parted each time the viewer wanted a glimpse of the man. In fact every full-page image in this modest manuscript has such sewing holes, indicating that it was once aflutter with curtains.

There seems to be an inverse correlation between the quality of the miniatures and the likelihood that an English owner would sew a curtain over the top, as if the owners were lending additional dignity to their images to capture for them some of the glory associated with imperial splendor, when in fact they were made by workshop hacks.

Sewing in curtains is yet another procedure from the earlier Middle Ages that fifteenth-century book owners adopted and developed. But they changed the meaning of the gesture when they began making such curtains commonplace, rather than reserving them for only the most ornate display volumes.

* * *

My discussion above has systematically treated the techniques that book owners had at hand when they wanted to adjust the contents of their books. They added texts and images both formally and informally,

53 Christine Sciacca, “Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts,” in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed.

Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert, Medieval Church Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 161–90.

which is to say, they made scrawls and doodles in their bound books, but they also commissioned professionals to add inscriptions or to make images or to inscribe texts on separate leaves, which could then be attached to the book with glue, thread, or mere friction. Other items, such as loose paintings, found a home in books in a symbiotic relationship: the leaves embellished the books, while the books protected the leaves. Many of these additions reveal the changed circumstances of the book, such as a change in ownership, or a new devotion. With such alterations the book becomes a witness before God for manumission and other legal documents, and it becomes a treasure trove in which a series of owners can store and remember small things. Everyone wanted to get in on the new devotion, even if it meant altering the book physically. Physical changes to the book became changes in the owner’s relationship—including physical relationship—to that book, as the new additions created new spaces of worship or intensified the owner’s ability to manifest devotion.

In many cases, the placement of these additions contributed to their meaning. Glosses make most sense next to the texts they explicate.

Owners added prayers in response to particular images. People made inscriptions on the backs of particular images, in order to bring the words as close as possible to the figures represented on the other side of the parchment membrane. Owners wanted to assert their ownership either at the very beginning or the very end of the book, thereby commanding the entirety. Thus, many inscriptions are positionally charged.

Other additions were made as space permitted. Owners had an interest in adding desired texts and images to the front of the book, not only because there was often space available for doing so, but also because the front was a privileged position. As most books of hours were put together with the Hours of the Virgin at the front, and the Vigil for the dead at the back, with the Penitential Psalms in the middle, they frame a world-view bookended by conception (the Annunciation) and death, with sinning and guilt in the middle. People were drawn to the front end of this array.

This part has considered images and texts written into available space, as well as pre-existing pieces of inscribed parchment that have been affixed to the book later, occasionally with needle and thread, but

usually with glue. Gluing objects in added to the page’s stiffness, and there was a limit to the amount of stuff that could be glued in before the book would not properly open. The way to add multiple parchment sheets was not to glue them in, but to take the book out of its binding and sew them along its spine.