It is important to appreciate who owned manuscripts of the De re militari in the Middle Ages, and the reasons why they may have wished to do so. Individual owners are revealed by a number of different sources. Wills record texts belonging to particular individuals, as do inventories of goods drawn up after death. Library catalogues, on the other hand, often list the manuscripts owned by institutions, religious or educational, or by rulers who succeed one another through inheritance. Almost by definition, catalogues are concerned with collections of texts, often gathered over a long period of time. These seldom tell us about the tastes and interests of individuals in the way that a will, a very personal document, can do. They are more likely to reveal what the users of a particular library, the monks who constituted an established community for example, found interesting and useful over the generations it took to create the collection. Nor will they betray what individual readers thought of a particular text, except what they sometimes wrote, anonymously, in the margins. Yet such institutional copies are important for the way they may have ensured both the physical safety and a greater knowledge and appreciation of a particular text than of one held in a private library.

However, some manuscripts, particularly later ones, do reveal who copied them, and for whom, while the date (in particular) and place are often recorded. Very occasionally, too, we are even let into the secret of how much a manuscript cost its owner. Other, more general, factors can help in our search. Palaeographical evidence is often valuable. Occasionally an individual hand may be recognised and, when compared with other examples, can lead to the identification of a scribe. Styles of writing and illumination can reveal both dates and the broad geographical origins of the scribe and artist. Whether the text is written on parchment or paper is another indication of date, while watermarks may enable one to attach a date and an indication of geographical origins to a manuscript.