Waste not, want not: the sustainability of medieval manuscripts

Abstract

Manuscript books – as the material incarnations of medieval literature – present intriguing avenues of inquiry into the nature of literature and sustainability. This discussion is structured to address the animal origins of the manuscript, and then to move from the heart of the physical book outwards, from examples of reinforcing strips, via other parchment reuses, finishing with wrappers. Manuscript case studies of each of these phenomena are drawn from medieval collections held in Oxford, Cambridge and Worcester Cathedral. This article debates concepts of “sustainability”, reading two senses of sustainability in the production and treatment of books in the fifteenth century. Throughout this discussion, manuscript books are found to exist in a “dynamic ecology of use and reuse”. Therefore, the evidence considered in this article suggests that books and book materials were indeed subject to widespread “waste not, want not” attitudes.

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