The final chapter of this book deals with destruction and misery for the manuscripts in question, but at the same time with research opportunities and hope for those who study them. Appropriately for a last chapter in a book on manuscript culture, the story starts with the birth of printing. This invention made manuscripts oldfashioned and subsequently sparked a “recycling program” of handwritten books across Europe. Indeed, as surprising as it may seem if you have never heard of it, thousands of manuscripts were sliced, diced, and stripped for parts on a systematic basis until well into the eighteenth century. Let's give the medieval manuscript a final curtain call and observe what happened to many of them when their role as the primary carrier of texts was played out.

Culprit 1: The Bookbinder

Many manuscripts fell victim to recycling at the hands of binders, who cut them up to use for added support in the bookbindings of new printed copies. Like cars at a scrap yard, many medieval manuscripts were mutilated and plundered for parts until almost nothing was left. Single pages and small strips were cut away from handwritten books and pasted onto the spines of their printed cousins (see Figure 126). There the fragments remained, hidden out of sight, covered by the leather of the binding. Additionally, fragments of manuscripts were also used to cover the bindings of printed books (or sometimes other manuscripts).

In spite of their mutilated appearance, manuscript fragments can be of great importance. The early history of the Bible, for example, could not have been written without the fragmentary evidence retrieved from Early Modern bindings. Fragments are interesting even for historians of printed texts, because printed books were also cut up to serve as binding material. The seventeenth-century book in Leiden's Bibliotheca Thysiana shown in Figure 125, for example, has a large fragment of an early printed book (perhaps even an incunabulum) pasted on the outside of its binding. The reason for reusing this page has to do with the material it was made from—parchment—which was deemed tough enough to protect the binding and withstand daily use in a library. Durability is also the reason why most fragments cut from medieval manuscripts are made out of parchment, like the parchment strips from a twelfth-century Latin manuscript glued inside a sixteenth-century binding of a printed book (Figure 126).