Filling the page with words and abbreviations is arguably the most important production stage of the manuscript, but there was a task that the scribe had to complete before he could start writing: he had to design the page, meaning that he had to decide how large the page and the textblock on it would be, how many columns the latter would have, and if he needed to leave blank spaces for initial letters to be added when he was finished copying. There was also the issue of the margins, which take up quite a bit of space on the page: how large would they be? How should they be positioned around the edges of the page? And was there any information that they needed to hold?

Margins are a universal feature of books. From the very earliest specimens produced almost two millennia ago to the e-readers we use today, books contain pages that hold both text and a significant amount of blank space. A particularly extraordinary aspect of marginal space is that there is so very much of it in medieval books. My own work on the twelfth century, which reflects broader medieval patterns, shows that pages from that period consist of approximately 50 per cent margin, and in some cases significantly more. This implies, astonishingly, that the majority of medieval books are half empty, despite the fact that parchment was expensive and sometimes even hard to come by. Why is this?

Inherited Tradition

One answer to this question is a simple one: because this is how books were traditionally made. Medieval scribes adopted a great deal of material features that were first introduced by their counterparts in antiquity. The book as we know it—that is, an object produced from quires—came into existence in the fourth century, as explained in the General Introduction (see p. 2). The pages of the famous Codex Sinaiticus, a copy of the Greek New Testament from around the middle of the fourth century, measures 38.1 cm high × 34.5 cm wide, while the text itself takes up 25 cm × 31 cm. A simple calculation reveals that the text takes up 58 per cent of the page, while 42 per cent is reserved for the outer margins. In other words, a little under half of this magnificent book is empty.