3 - The format of books – books, booklets and rolls

Summary

Two manuscripts at Westminster Abbey exemplify the extremes of format possible for books at the end of the fourteenth century. The first is the famous Missal, commissioned by Abbot Nicholas Litlyngton (1362–86), and for which payments are recorded on his Treasurer’s rolls for the years 1382–4. This large and imposing volume, lavishly illuminated (fig. 3.1), can only have been intended for display on the altar on feast days. At other times it was kept in the vestry. The second is a small pamphlet in which the writer addresses point by point an unknown theologian’s comments on ‘Quoniam fideles’, an encyclical letter from the University of Paris, 1395, on the papal schism. This untidily written paper pamphlet consists of three conjoint leaves or bifolia. Instead of being sewn one inside the other to form a gathering, the writer has first folded one sheet into two (fols. 1–2), written it, folded another and written it (fols. 3–4), then the third (fols. 5–6), ending on fol. 6r. He then sewed the bifolia one after the other on two parchment strips cut from a discarded inventory of relics belonging to the abbey. Finally, he folded the leaves down the middle to form a narrow booklet that might easily be slipped into his habit or hung from his girdle. As the text ended on the recto of the last leaf of the third bifolium, the blank fol. 6v thus became the pamphlet’s cover on which the title ‘De scismate’ was written.