The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages by Thomas Forrest Kelly

In the standard, simplified narrative of book history, the codex replaced the scroll and is being replaced in turn by the e-book. However, just as the e-book seems unlikely to kill the codex any time soon, the codex did not eliminate the scroll. Although typical medieval examples work differently than ancient scrolls, opening vertically rather than horizontally, the form persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. As Thomas Forrest Kelly points out in The Role of the Scroll, it persists even now: the scrolling action of online reading recalls the continuous text of a scrollformat manuscript. Placing the scroll (Kelly's preferred term) at the center of his investigation of medieval manuscript culture reasserts the importance of this neglected form.

Kelly's preface sets out two key goals for the book. First, he aims to provide "an exploration, a set of highlights of some of the most interesting scrolls in medieval history, [putting] them in the context of the people who made them, commissioned them, and used them" (xiii). Second, he aims to answer the question, "Why make a scroll when you could make a book?" (xiii). The primary focus is on manuscripts produced in medieval western Europe, although the introductory chapter has a broader geographical and chronological reach, discussing scrolls om Asia, A ica, and the ancient world. The rest of the book is divided into chapters according to possible reasons for making scrolls: those that grow, those that represent continuous space or time, those used for performance, those intended for private or secret use, and those used in the conduct of a ritual. As Kelly notes, more than one of these reasons might apply to any given manuscript.

Each chapter consists primarily of short case studies of particular manuscripts or manuscript types that illustrate that chapter's key reason for choosing a scroll over a codex. The manuscript discussions provide glimpses of life in medieval Europe: scrolls containing the recipe collection The Forme of Cury introduce information about spices and feasting, for instance, while scroll-format inventories of New Year's gifts received in Elizabethan England spark paragraphs on gift exchange at court. The book therefore serves as a series of windows onto medieval European culture. This is both positive and negative in terms of Kelly's goals. It provides a clear and lively impression of the range of areas in which scrolls were used and, for a nonspecialist reader, an engaging introduction to an unfamiliar period. However, it also moves the focus om form to text, meaning that the emphasis on why to choose a scroll can be lost.

The general reasons Kelly proposes for making scrolls are useful, and it is clear om the wealth of examples he provides that these are categories into which many surviving scrolls fall. However, the book's goal of showcasing especially interesting and extraordinary examples of scrolls is to some extent contradictory to its goal of explaining why a scroll might be made, since any explanation for why scrolls were chosen over codices requires equal attention to the most typical of surviving examples. While the reader is given a very welcome introduction to the richness of the scroll form, the book's arguments about individual scrolls occasionally fail to differentiate between things a scroll can do, and things a scroll can do that a codex cannot. For example, scrolls are said to be appropriate for recipe collections "partly because [the scroll] can grow, and partly because it can be opened to the recipe wanted" (53). While the possibility of extending a scroll may be important in the choice of form, it is surely not realistic to suggest that a scroll can be more easily opened to the desired recipe than a codex. A similar argument is made about a pilgrims' guide: that the scroll form might have been chosen "for portability, and to open easily to the names of the next places on the traveler's itinerary" (80). Again, the argument about portability is persuasive, but the argument about easy access to any point in the text is not.

The book as a whole is let down by typographic errors and careless slips. One map has been printed upside-down, place names and all (55). Beinecke MS 410, an indulgence scroll, is described as being 67½ inches wide instead of 6½ (136). The price of a manual stolen in 1282 is given as 6d 8d when it should presumably be 6s 8d—or even 26s 8d, given that other published accounts of this text record that the stolen manual was worth two marks (113). There are also errors in transcription om the manuscripts: "tuyning" for "tayninge" in the Wellcome Library's MS 693 (64); "waking" for "wapyne" in the Beinecke's MS 410 (136). This gives the unfortunate impression that a book clearly derived om extensive manuscript research has not paid attention to the details of the manuscripts themselves.

Happily, the book's illustrations do the opposite. The Role of the Scroll contains full-color images throughout, giving the reader a visual impression of the beauty and variety of the manuscripts under discussion. There is much to enjoy in the range of scrolls depicted. The illustrations also demonstrate the difficulty of representing scrolls in a printed codex, however: very few of the pictures show a whole scroll, since the nature of the object is such that it cannot comfortably be shown on a codex page. On one occasion Kelly directs the reader to a digitized copy of a scroll, the Tabula Peuteringiana. This is an excellent supplement, which, as many of the rolls discussed have been digitized, could have been used more extensively.

Alongside the book Kelly has produced a website, to which the preface directs the reader. Medievalscrolls.com includes a searchable database of more than six hundred medieval manuscript rolls, an online learning module, and an extensive bibliography. The database, in particular, is a huge endeavor, and one for which scholars in the field will rightly be grateful. Although academics wishing to use the database should be aware that its search filter is imperfect—filtering by repository for Durham Cathedral Library, for example, reveals four manuscripts at that institution, while a text search for the name of the library yields twenty—it nevertheless provides an invaluable starting point for scrolls research. Bringing together the surviving examples in a single resource will spur further work in the field.

Despite its editorial issues, the book succeeds in providing a series of detailed and enchanting vignettes of medieval culture for a nonspecialist audience, and in demonstrating to scholars how widespread the use of the scroll form was after the invention of the codex. Scrolls have received relatively little scholarly attention, and it is therefore a pleasure to see a work that introduces them, through vivid text and images, to a broader audience. Although The Role of the Scroll does not ultimately provide fully persuasive answers to its own central question of why manuscripts continued to be copied in scroll form, its goal of presenting interesting examples of scrolls is admirably achieved. As for why scrolls were made, the book and the database will surely attract other scholars to the question—and enable them to pursue the answer with greater ease.