As the previous chapters have shown, medieval readers were pragmatic and they did not shy away from adding things to their books if it enhanced their reading experience. While so far the focus has been on additions to the page, this chapter introduces a physical tool that was sometimes added to enhance the reading experience even further: the bookmark, which, like the manicula, had a variety of appearances. Here we look at the various ways in which monks and other medieval readers kept track of the page at which they had stopped reading, and from which they planned to continue reading in the near future. What tools were available for this purpose? And how did these differ from one another?

Static Bookmarks

If certain bookmarks can be called “smart,” and some really are, it follows that others were, well, dumb. In bookmark terms that qualifier must go to types that are fixed to one specific page rather than being able to freely move throughout the book. Some of these static bookmarks were extremely easy to produce. All the reader had to do, for example, was attach a string to the corner of the page. A slightly more labour-intensive version of this static bookmark is seen in Figure 73. It was produced by making a small cut in the corner of the page, after which the emerging strip was guided through a small incision, and then folded outwards, so as to stick out of the book. The result was as unmovable as it was destructive to the page. A slightly less invasive version, no doubt preferred by medieval librarians, didn't involve cutting but rather gluing a tiny strip of parchment on the long side of the page. These “fore-edge” bookmarks could even be filled with extra information, such as which section started at the marked location.

Dynamic Bookmarks

Far more “technical” and interesting from a book-historical point of view are bookmarks that could be used at any page of the manuscript because they were movable—let's call these dynamic. An unusual thirteenth-century example survives in what is now Amsterdam, UB, I G 56– 57: heart-shaped bookmarks that could be clipped onto a page. Notably, they were cut out of a thirteenth-century manuscript with scissors.