Medieval Manuscripts: Exploring Craftsmanship, Ownership, and Use

Thome famulo tuo’: An Owner for Beinecke MS 410
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 410 is a finely decorated late fifteenth-century prayer roll. Currently, its first owner, depicted as a kneeling cleric beneath an image of the Five Wounds, has not been identified with any certainty. This is despite the presence in the manuscript of his first name, Thomas, inserted into a prayer, and two identifiable escutcheons. In this paper, I will propose an identity for this figure, and locate this manuscript and its original owner in a specific collegiate context. Drawing on the heraldic evidence the roll provides, and antiquarian and visual evidence from Lincolnshire and Norfolk, alongside archival research, I argue that this man was a fellow at Tattershall College, Lincolnshire. In doing so, I dispute the catalogue’s tentative identification of this figure, and also provide a counter to the most recent scholarly interpretation of this manuscript as a ‘birth girdle,’ a spiritually and physically protective artefact made explicitly to protect women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Material Manuscripts: A view from the bench
This paper will review the idea of the materiality of the manuscript book from a conservator's point of view, and attempt to recover some of the understanding of the parchments and principles of binding which medieval craftspeople had, but which were eroded over subsequent centuries of producing printed paper books.