Fragmentology (manuscripts)

Fragmentology is the study of surviving parts of medieval or renaissance manuscripts. Manuscript fragments may consist of whole or partial leaves typically made of parchment or vellum, a type of parchment, conjugate pairs or sometimes gatherings of a parchment book or codex, or parts of single-leaf documents such as notarial acts. Manuscript fragments also are commonly found in book bindings, especially printed books from the 15th to the 17th centuries, used in a variety of ways such as wrappers or covers for the book, as endpapers, or cut into pieces and used to reinforce the binding. In recent years, fragmentology has become an active part of scholarly medieval studies fuelled, in part, by the abundance in institutional libraries of binding fragments that have never been studied or catalogued. A number of symposia, websites and projects have been formed to pursue the study.

Leaves and parts of parchment leaves have been used in bindings of manuscripts since the Middle Ages. The use of manuscript fragments in bindings increased greatly at the end of the 15th century when printed books began to appear in increasing numbers, supplanting many older manuscripts. The conversion of northern Europe to Protestantism and the closing of monasteries and convents resulted in the discarding of many Catholic religious and liturgical manuscripts some of which were used by bookbinders. Sometimes, manuscript fragments have been removed from bookbindings either because the fragments were viewed as significant or valuable, or in the course of rebinding. Removal of these fragments destroys important context and evidence and is strongly criticized by scholars. Where it is necessary to remove such fragments, accepted practice requires they be preserved with the book and their original location recorded.

Manuscript fragments may provide a variety of useful evidence for medievalists, bibliographers and paleographers, including:

Beginning in the nineteenth century, collectors cut ornamented initial letters and miniatures from illuminated manuscripts. In the twentieth century some book dealers began removing leaves from manuscripts to be sold for greater profit as individual pages or keepsakes. This "breaking" of manuscripts has been most common with books of hours which contain illuminated pages, gilding and attractive decorations. "As a result, today there are tens of thousands of single leaves in several hundred U.S. collections." This practice continues today and many individual leaves of books of hours and antiphonals are available on eBay and from book and manuscript dealers. Scholars strongly condemn this practice, even where the manuscript is incomplete to begin with, as it destroys the integrity and evidence of the entire manuscript. The most famous or infamous manuscript breaker was Otto Ege, who dismembered many complete and fragmentary manuscripts to sell the leaves individually or in large boxed collections.

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