Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings, with a Survey of Oxford Binding c. 1515-1620 (review)

Lev Grossman's The Codex (2004) is an airport thriller set in modern-day New York. Its one redeeming feature is the fact that its denouement hinges on the enjoyable idea that a fourteenth-century manuscript was deviously preserved from deliberate destruction by being hidden, and its text disguised by being cut up and used as pastedowns in the bindings of the books of a later library, in such a way that the original manuscript could later be reconstructed by reference to the shelfmarks of the volumes in which the pastedowns were affixed.

Turning to the book under review, the Oxford Bibliographical Society has reprinted this fundamental study, originally published in 1954, for two good reasons: because the original is now scarce outside the libraries that were members of the Society in the 1950s, and because it has recently published David Pearson's Oxford Bookbinding (Oxford, 2000), which was always intended to be used alongside the Ker volume. The original is reproduced in its entirety, but with some twenty-five pages of addenda and corrigenda, and reference is made to these, and to the Pearson book, by a system of marginal sigla.

This is one of those books that is difficult to use, and whose purpose may be obscure, without some explanation. What Ker's dry-as-dust title wilfully fails to convey is how much of interest can be gleaned from a study of pastedowns. Oxford bindings can usually be distinguished from those produced in other places, and large numbers survive in Oxford and elsewhere today. Most of them can be fairly precisely dated by reference to the date of the printing of the edition they contain, by comparison with other bindings employing the same tools, by early ownership inscriptions, and by other such methods. A systematic study such as this therefore enables one to form a picture of which medieval manuscripts were available and being used as scrap parchment in Oxford, by which binders, and at which dates. It demonstrates, for example, that canon law manuscripts were used as scrap from the late fifteenth century (doubtless they were being replaced in Oxford libraries by printed copies), and that service books became common fodder in the 1540s, in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Once one has identified the manuscripts that were being used as scrap by particular binders at particular dates, one may tentatively attribute unidentified bindings to those binders based on their pastedowns. Fragments of manuscripts that survive solely as pastedowns may be the only evidence that a particular text was read in Oxford in the Middle Ages, and thus the implications of a study such as this extends beyond bibliography into the history of thought, scholarship, and the University. In some cases a 'lost' manuscript can be substantially reconstructed from pastedowns: at least 109 leaves survive of a single copy of Hugh of St Victor's De sacramentis, for example, and a similar number from a Glossed Gospel of John. At least one text, the twelfth-century 'Cronica inperfecta' from Christ Church, Canterbury, is otherwise unknown (see no. 945).

After a brief introduction, the bulk of the book consists of a listing of more than 2,200 pastedowns, arranged in groups according to the types of binding decoration (stamped bindings, c.1480–1516; roll bindings, c.1574–1620; centrepiece bindings, c.1565–1620, etc.). Within these broad types the entries are arranged by type of roll or stamp; and within each type, alphabetically by current location. Each entry consists of a running number, a very brief indication of the pastedowns' contents, date, number of leaves, number of columns, numbers of lines per column (when this is apparent), followed by details of the book in which...