Kenneth Spencer Research Library

This post was written Public Services student assistant Kit Cavazos as part of their summer internship supervised by KU English Professor Misty Schieberle and Special Collections Curator Eve Wolynes.

Although medieval manuscripts are well-known for their look and style, the act of actually reading and understanding one can be tough. The image that often comes to mind is that of their non-naturalistic drawings, and thus, a casual viewer may see the squiggles sprinkled across the text as another odd decoration. However, many serve specific and intentional functions, acting as contractions, substitutions, or abbreviations of words or parts of words. Scribes often chose this practice because it saved on ink and parchment space, since both these materials were quite expensive.

The first and most prominent thing to note about manuscript notation is the dashes that are most often placed over vowels. Most of the time, these indicate a missing letter N or M. For example, “terram” shortens to “terrā.” The page above has quite a few examples in the first line: “qua[m],” “lapide[m],” and “lapide[m].”

Dashes can often have other meanings when interacting with a consonant, either by hovering above or crossing the letter. The incipit line of the above page has a quite recognizable first word, which substitutes an I for a J. This letter difference is generally because Latin, as a language, does not use the letter J, meaning our first word is “Judea.” Thus it is easier to understand part of the next noun, which has a letter L with a dash intersecting it, with the result resembling a stylized letter T. Picking out when a letter is a T or an L is made easy by way of comparison, as the page’s script will always have a style that differentiates letter that could be confused.

Thus, this L with an intersecting dash in the spine could represent a few similar letter clumps: “ler…,” “…ul,” “lor…,” or “al…,” among others. Despite knowing exactly what variations the letter could stand for, it still introduces a new wrinkle into the fold, as none of the suggested meanings for the substitutions seem to make the word wholly understandable. “Jerlerm,” “Jerulm,” “Jerlorm,” and “Jeralm” are not proper words, and thus, the contraction demonstrates how common words (such as proper nouns) could have more of an abstract contraction. When examining this word in context, it might be a bit easier to understand that this contraction represents the city named “Jerusalem.”

Another common symbol is this: , which often represents a “rum,” “ram,  or “rem” sort of ending. The above example has multiple instances of its use within the first line, all taking the first possible ending. The line, when uncontracted, would read “verbi salutaris ac miraculorum suorum dulcidine” (“by the sweetness of his saving word and miracles”). These textual changes – both contractions and substitutions – indicate that both scribes and readers needed to have not only a deep understanding of what each symbol represented, but also a sense of the language. You could either look at the Latin and parse some words, or you could understand how to complete the words but have their meaning completely lost on you. This afforded the literate members of the population some form of exclusivity from everyone else. These manuscripts often contain important information about plants, animals, or other general encyclopedic knowledge.

Another important aspect of a manuscript is additions that enhance a reader’s understanding of the text. The most obvious would be the fingers pointing to specific lines. These are manicules, and they are meant to emphasize important parts of the text. Another detail does something similar on the above page. The red lines highlighting specific letters are forms of rubrication, and they have a very similar function to manicules. In this instance, they mean to indicate and emphasize the capital letters in the line.

In other instances, rubrication notates significant parts of the text and frequently has a moralizing meaning. This means it can also come in textual form – often called the rubric – and it can add, emphasize, or reiterate important information to the reader. The term rubrication comes from the Latin word “ruber” (“red”), but important elements to a manuscript are not restricted solely to one color. Red often sees the most use, but blue and occasionally green can also be used for emphasis or decoration.

With these basic understandings of common aspects of a medieval text (at least within the Spencer collection), reading a manuscript for the first time may be less daunting. The above page, for example, has several features already discussed. Most prominently, the rubrication stands out from the rest of the content, especially in the rubricated initial letters A and I, which have blue decoration that appears to mimic a lace design. The first rubricated word of the text is in the incipit line, which has the same L with an intersecting dash as before. Thus, we know the word would be something like “pp[ul]m” or something similar. If you don’t have a book on contractions easily to hand, sometimes sounding out what letters you do have can help make sense of the word – “populum,” in this instance. Thus, reading through the incipit line, it would say something like “Absol[v]e q[uaesumu]s D[omine] p[o]p[u]l[um] n[ostr]o[rum] vincula peccato[rum]” (“we beseech you, O Lord, to absolve our people from the bonds of their sins”). From even just this first line, we can understand that the reader is meant to focus on the people or population about whom it is speaking.

Reading through a medieval text can be difficult; even just reading one line without translation can take hours, depending on how many contractions or abbreviations there are, as well as how obscure each one may be. The result, though, is quite often rewarding, as it means modern readers can understand how information was relayed and what information medieval writers saw as needing to be relayed. An online resource for information on specific abbreviations is Cappelli’s Latin Abbreviations, which has been incredibly helpful for research and compiling the transcription of these lines.

Kit Cavazos
Public Services student assistant

Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s current short-term exhibit explores some choice items from the library’s collection of medieval seals. This is a collaborative project put together by myself – Kaya Taylor – and my collaborator Eli Kumin, both of us long-time student workers here at the library.

Eli and I have cultivated a particular interest in medieval wax seals, spurred on by our work on a Sanders Scholar research project under the supervision of Dr. John McEwan. Beginning in September 2024, we spent the project exploring the Abbey Dore collection (Call Number: MS Q80) at Spencer, given the remarkably well-preserved seals and documents dating back from the 12th and 13th centuries. As the project came to a close in May 2025, Eli and I realized that we could memorialize our work and interests in the form of an exhibit case. Titled Sigillum, it is our way of giving others a look into these fascinating and unique pieces of history, here to be enjoyed roughly 4,000 miles away from where they originated.

The overarching narrative of the Abbey Dore collection is one of property and the interplay between royal and religious power in the medieval period. The language used in the documents points to the exchange of land for the salvation of the donors and their loved ones, e.g. “for her soul and the soul of Madoc [her husband]” (Call Number: MS Q80:13).

Visitors may notice there is one document unlike the others in the exhibit case, labeled “land conveyance of Sir Roger Lasceles to his four daughters” (Call Number: MS C150). Although separate from the Abbey Dore collection, this document is included because it’s a particular favorite of ours and it boasts several unique qualities: a chirograph edge and three intact seals with very clear impressions. We chose to include it at the starting point of the exhibit because of its eye-catching quality, pulling visitors into the discussion of further seals and documents within the case.

Although Eli and I came to know the Abbey Dore collection very well over time, we still felt a bit confused as to the relative geography of the Welsh Marches and the locations mentioned in the collection. We felt that visitors could benefit from seeing a map of the region, and so we resolved to make one that centered the relevant places and landmarks stretching across the Welsh-English border. Ultimately, we used ArcGIS software to put together the map seen in the exhibit.

We hope that Sigillum gives visitors a chance to appreciate not just the wax seals themselves, but the real human stories that stand behind them. We are excited to offer this glimpse into the medieval past, and grateful for the opportunity to bring these objects to light at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Sigillum: Seals and the Making of Medieval Authority is free and open to the public in Spencer’s North Gallery through July 31st.

Kaya Taylor and Eli Kumin
Public Services student assistants
KU Libraries Sanders Scholars 2024-2025

One of the most fascinating things about medieval manuscripts is that every copy is unique and individual. Because scribes wrote manuscripts by hand, no two copies are identical. On March 8th, Kenneth Spencer Research Library opened Marvelous Medieval Marginalia, an exhibit that celebrates the unique and the individual, the best parts of medieval manuscripts, and the scribes, readers, and owners who had a hand in transforming texts over time. It’s dedicated to the voices of not necessarily the great and influential authors and artists of old but to a quieter subset who aren’t always given the attention they deserve – the readers, the imaginers, and doodlers across centuries.

The exhibit focuses on marginalia. From the Latin for literally just “things in the margins,” marginalia can encompass many things, from formally executed illustrations meant to enhance the manuscript into a work of art to notes and annotations. We tend to think of books as static or frozen in time, but through marginalia and readers, they were often amorphous and ever-changing, shaped and reshaped by their owners over decades and centuries. Medieval readers were not merely passive consumers of manuscripts; they thought about and engaged with their texts, argued and agreed, and added their thoughts. And their relics are preserved in the notes they left behind, capturing their fleeting thoughts in amber for us to enjoy centuries later.

With annotations, we can see what people actually thought about the texts they read. They let us see where readers denied or disagreed with the original manuscript – as with this manuscript copy of Lactantius’ Divine Institutes, a defense of Christianity and a refutation of Greek and Roman polytheism.

An early reader has added the note “falsum” or “false” while striking lines through parts of the text – potentially either disagreeing with the text itself or perhaps claiming it was spurious and misattributed. Where readers’ notes give us insight into the sometimes-critical thoughts of medieval readers, their doodles provide glimpses into the universal experience of boredom and the creativity it can allow to blossom. With doodles, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” We doodle just as much today as people did 800 years ago, but what we doodle changes, reflecting the nuances of human culture and identity. It’s a time-honored tradition across the centuries; you’ve likely stuck at least a few notes in the margins of your class assignments or books over the years. Idle doodles encapsulate the wandering thoughts of people from the past as they were when they took quill pen to page.

Sometimes, it was the scribes themselves, the people writing and copying the manuscripts for later audiences, who added flares of fun into the margins. Copying manuscripts by hand was often a long and tedious process, taking anywhere from days to months. A certain playfulness to these marginalia emerged when the scribe’s mind and hand wandered. You wind up with texts like MS B15, a collection of Divine Offices, hymns, prayers, and devotional poetry, where the scribe has very diligently copied the text for over 700 pages, all written in the same hand so that you know this is one person scribbling page after page after page. But they’ve broken the tedium by dappling the tops and bottoms of letters with -Picasso-esque caricatures, skewed profile faces wearing silly hats, and the occasional peacock.

Marginalia can help reveal the silent reader’s voice and how they understood or analyzed texts – but even in the case of drawings and doodles, these weren’t all the product of an idle mind. Often, the doodles in the margins directly responded to and sometimes commented upon the text itself, creating visual commentary that shows how a scribe or reader responded to the work. These are called deliberate or communicative doodles.

Marginalia didn’t end with the advent of print, but they were unquestionably changed by it. In many ways, printing is more rigid than writing a manuscript. You work with a metal frame that limits where letters can fit, the shape of the page and its structure, and all the letters are predetermined shapes carved into small metal pieces that you then reorganize into different words. That rigidity, of course, meant that it was much easier to make literal copies of the text, nearly identical to one another.

While print stole some of the freedom and flexibility of the page and written word, readers continued to imbue their books with their agency and interpretations, even with the radical technological shift. One reader of Agostino Nifo’s A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather has bestowed nearly every page with minute illustrations connected to the text, highlighting the vibrancy of weather with sketches of animals associated with certain types of weather alongside copious notes, including a doodle of a bat next to Nifo’s claim that when bats fly in a great flock in the evening, it promises a calm, serene night.

Manuscripts reflect the medieval mind. Through marginalia, we can see how they organized their thoughts and how they reacted and responded to text and information.  In the same way, when you visit an exhibit, you bring your thoughts, experiences, and analyses to the books. As you go through it, you may pick and choose different parts of the exhibit that catch your eye and interest; you may find the exhibit text insightful (or boring!). My exhibit text will tell you what I think is important about materials, but those won’t be the same things that you find interesting or important. With this exhibit, open through July, I invite you to bring your own doodles to our margins – including the exhibit wall text! You’ll see the manuscripts mentioned above, with many more, that all embody the agency and choices of their readers over the centuries. We welcome you to read, think, and doodle about the exhibit (albeit preferably not in our manuscripts). Thank you for being a reader of our exhibits here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz is conducting research on pre-1600 manuscripts at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Each month she will be writing about a manuscript she has worked with and the current KU Library catalog records will be updated in accordance with her findings.

Kenneth Spencer Research Library MS 9/2:31 is one of the fragments in the “Paleographical Teaching Set” that was gradually put together in the second half of the twentieth century for facilitating teaching and learning of Greek and Latin paleography at the University of Kansas. We do not have any information about the origin or the history of the fragment, and the Latin text it contains had not been identified until now (no surprise, perhaps, given the largely illegible and mutilated nature of the parchment). The manuscript has been known at the Spencer Library as the “gaudio fragment.” The reason for this is that the word “gaudio” [joy], which is repeated twice on one side of the fragment, is one of the few easily legible words. Without the identification of the text it contains, this became a practical way to refer to MS 9/2:31.

Careful investigation now has revealed that MS 9/2:31 contains part of the first chapter of the first book of the De ecclesiasticis officiis libri quatuor [Four Books on Ecclesiastical Offices] by Amalarius of Metz (approximately 780–850). Amalarius was employed at the courts of both Charlemagne (748–814) and his son and successor Louis the Pious (778–840). He was the bishop of Trier (812–813) and Lyon (835–838), and in 813 was sent as the Frankish ambassador to the Byzantine Empire, to Constantinople (modern day Istanbul, Turkey). Written between the years 820 and 832, the De ecclesiasticis officiis was dedicated to Louis the Pious.

Since the text was previously unidentified, the sides of MS 9/2:31 were also misattributed, with the text beginning on what is thought to be the verso side and continuing some fifteen lines later on the other side. As it stands, MS 9/2:31 is less than half of the original leaf. It measures approximately 100 x 170 mm, with 12 lines of text remaining, of which only 2 lines are fully visible on each side. Although the fragment contains an early witness to the De ecclesiasticis officiis by Amalarius of Metz, its later use as a binding component is more interesting for book history.

The peculiar shape of MS 9/2:31 is due to the fact that it was repurposed at some point in its later history; the leaf was cut to shape and used as a spine lining of another codex. It was then detached from this codex before it was incorporated into the collections of the Spencer Library. Until recently, it was common for repurposed fragments to be removed from their bindings, either by booksellers or by the holding institutions, and to be inventoried (or sold) separately. There are annotations in pencil in a modern hand in the lower margin of the recto side of MS 9/2:31: “Dutch,” or more likely “Deutsch [German]” and “17th cent.” This inscription probably refers to the codex from which the fragment came, perhaps a manuscript written (or a book printed) in the seventeenth century in Germany (or the Netherlands). This specific type of lining is called comb spine lining, which takes its name from its appearance of a comb with wide teeth due to the slots along one of the edges of the parchment.

As a comb spine lining, MS 9/2:31 would have been used vertically and it would have had another tooth, which is now missing, as seen in the reconstruction above. Furthermore, it probably had a counterpart as comb spine linings usually consist of two parchment (rarely paper) parts. A similar example of a comb spine lining, also detached from the codex in which it was found, is Cambridge, Trinity College, R.11.2/21. In this case, both parts of the lining survive, and not only that, they are made from the same leaf. So, it is more than likely that the other half of the original leaf of MS 9/2:31 was used as its counterpart in the comb spine lining.

In the codex, the teeth of the two parts of the comb spine lining would have lain over each other in the spine panel. The outer halves of each lining (the parts that are not slotted), which are called lining extensions, probably would have been adhered to the inside of the boards of the codex. From this reconstruction we can tell that the codex for which the spine lining was used was approximately 170 mm in height and had four sewing supports, which would have corresponded to the empty slots created by the teeth of the spine lining. Comb spine linings were used from the later Middle Ages onwards in continental Europe, most notably in Germany, Italy and France. The survival of fragments such as MS 9/2:31 is significant not only because of the texts they contain; they also enable scholars to study and understand medieval and early modern book structures, and in some cases localize and date manuscripts. Although often called “manuscript waste” in scholarship because the original manuscripts were discarded for whatever reason, these repurposed fragments clearly did not go to waste and there is still much we can learn from them.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher

Follow the account “Manuscripts &c.” on Twitter and Instagram for postings about manuscripts from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz is conducting research on pre-1600 manuscripts at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Each month she will be writing about a manuscript she has worked with and the current KU Library catalog records will be updated in accordance with her findings. 

Kenneth Spencer Research Library MS D40 consists of two gatherings that contain parts of the Gospel of Matthew in French. The first gathering is made up of a bifolium, possibly missing six leaves, whereas the second gathering seems to be more or less intact, with all eight leaves still surviving. We have no information on the history of MS D40, but it is clear from its current state that these leaves were once used as part of a binding of another book. The outer edges and corners of several of the leaves are cut off in different shapes and a number of the leaves, which are also very worn, are soiled.

When MS D40 was purchased by the University of Kansas in 1964, the fragmentary manuscript was dated by the bookseller to “ca. 1425.” Over the years, the librarians at Spencer revised this dating first to sometime in the 1300s, then to around 1400, then to around 1400 or earlier, and finally to 1385-1399. Still, Ann Hyde, the former manuscripts librarian at Spencer, noted in her unpublished in-house description of the manuscript, “Why not earlier?” Since its purchase, MS D40 has been examined by a series of researchers at the University of Kansas and has been used for different classes; however, as far as I am aware, no one has published any study of it. I should also mention, there are over 240 known translations of the Bible into French from the tenth century to 1450 (Sneddon, p. 251).

At the time of its purchase, MS D40 was accompanied by photostats of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 899. These belonged to the previous owner of the manuscript, who remains unknown to us. Dated to around 1260, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 899 is considered to be the earliest surviving copy of the Old French Bible. Known as the Bible française du XIIIe siècle, the Old French Bible is the first (full) prose translation of the Bible from Latin into French and is thought to have been undertaken sometime after 1220 and before the Paris manuscript was produced in around 1260. It is also the first complete vernacular Bible translation in Western Europe.

As it stands, MS D40 contains the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 2:16-4:25, 9:22-10:28 and 12:1-21:35. There is no indication in our records at Spencer Library as to whether Ann Hyde or any of the researchers who studied the manuscript ever compared it to the version of the text in the Paris manuscript. After careful examination, I found that the passages in MS D40 correspond very closely to the copy of the Old French Bible found in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 899, folios 271vb-272vb; 276ra-276vb and 277vb-288va. Thus, this manuscript could be not any French vernacular Bible but a hitherto unknown fragment of the Old French Bible. Not only that, there are reasons to suspect that it might be dated earlier, to the thirteenth century.

Indeed, not only is the text in MS D40 very close to that of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 899, but also the illumination program in both manuscripts is very similar. The beginnings of chapters 2, 3, 10, 12-21 of the Gospel of Matthew are present in MS D40. All chapters open with two- to three-line alternately red and blue initials with penwork in the opposite color as well as chapter numbers in Roman numerals preceded with a pilcrow (paragraph mark), also in red and blue. The manuscript also has running titles in red and blue (MA | TE to indicate Matthew) in upper margins. What I identify as the blue color in MS D40 is almost completely faded in all of the leaves, now visible to the naked eye as pale gray. Similar initials with penwork, chapter numbers in Roman numerals and running titles, all of which are also in two alternating colors, are present in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 899.

According to Clive R. Sneddon, the Old French Bible survives in some 20 witnesses. The oldest Paris manuscript is incomplete and mutilated, with almost all of its illuminations, which were at the beginnings of books, having been excised and removed. More complete copies include New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.494; Chantilly, Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condé, 4 and Chantilly, Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condé, 5 (two volumes); London, British Library, Harley 616 and London, British Library, Yates Thompson 9 (two volumes). All dated to the last quarter of the thirteenth century, these three copies of the Bible seem more similar to each other than they are to Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 899, especially in terms of their decoration programs. There are also several fragmentary manuscripts, some of which are seemingly related to the Paris manuscript. Some of these fragments are repurposed manuscripts as well, and they are still in situ, such as leaves from a fourteenth-century manuscript that now form the front flyleaves of Oxford, Bodleian Library, 4o I 1 Th. Seld.

MS D40 is written in Gothic script. Although the Gothic script has been surveyed extensively, the focus has been mostly on manuscripts written in Latin. As Marie-Hélène Tesnière points out “the [thirteenth-century] script in [French] vernacular manuscripts has to date not been the object of a palaeographical study” (p. 334). My understanding is that the vernacular script was less formal, smaller and closer to Praegothica, a blanket term used to describe transitional scripts between Carolingian script and Gothic script during the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the general features still apply. Albert Derolez outlines the most common features of the most common form of Gothic script known as textualis as follows: a in two compartments; f and tall s not going beneath the baseline; b, h, k, and l without loops on their ascenders. All of these features fit with the script used in MS D40 as is seen in the detail from folio 10v above. Since the script (and the layout) in our manuscript is less formal and less rigid than what would be called formata, it may be classified as Gothica textualis libraria.

It is possible to find manuscripts written in Gothica textualis libraria from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Certain characteristics of the writing, however, allow us to speculate on the date of a manuscript. I will give two such examples as to why I think MS D40 might be dated earlier, to the thirteenth century: these concern the letter a and the letter d. In her discussion of manuscripts produced in France, Tesnière states that “toward 1300, the a is made with a double bow. It will close truly into the form of a box in the fourteenth century” (p. 326). Derolez similarly maintains that “the top of the shaft of a turns over to the left in the thirteenth century, and […] the bow thus formed tends to be closed from the fourteenth century” (p. 84). In MS D40, there is only one shape of a: it is the “double-bow a,” which is in two compartments (as in the words “ma,” “sera,” “apelee” on line 2, folio 10v). As for the letter d, here is what Derolez observes: “When writing Textualis at the Currens and Libraria levels, scribes trained with the documentary tradition sometimes took advantage of the space offered by the left-hand margin to extend the shaft of the Uncial d at the beginning of the line to the left and might even start with an upward movement of the pen” (p. 87). He calls this type of d, a “falling d.” The letter d is found in two shapes in MS D40: Uncial d and this very “falling d.” Both are displayed in the first line of folio 10v, in the first word “de” and the fourth word “doient.” What is interesting, moreover, Derolez states that “this phenomenon of ‘falling’ d (sometimes also observed in the middle of lines […]) seems to be limited to manuscripts of the thirteenth century and early fourteenth century” (p. 97). These observations lead me to hypothesize that MS D40 might be dated to much earlier than it was previously suggested. I therefore look forward to further investigations on MS D40 by specialists of thirteenth-century French vernacular manuscripts and those working on French Bibles.

The Kenneth Spencer Research Library purchased the manuscript from Martin Breslauer, Inc. in November 1964, and it is available for consultation at the Library’s Marilyn Stokstad Reading Room when the library is open.

Further reading:

• Pierre-Maurice Bogaert et al., Les bibles en français: histoire illustrée du Moyen Age à nos jours. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. [KU Libraries]
• Clive R. Sneddon. “The Bible in French.” In The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Volume 2: From 600 to 1450. Edited by Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 251–67. [KU Libraries]
• Albert Derolez. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [KU Libraries]
• Marie-Hélène Tesnière. “Gothic Script in France in the Later Middle Ages (XIIIth-XVth Centuries).” Translated by Frank T. Coulson. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography. Edited by Frank Coulson and Robert Babcock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 321–90. [KU Libraries]

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher
Follow the account “Manuscripts &c.” on Twitter and Instagram for postings about manuscripts from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library.