Medieval CSI What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show...
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Medieval CSI What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show...
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Medieval CSI

What I like about studying old books from medieval times is that they sometimes get you very close to the historical users of the objects. Notes jotted down in the margins may suggest readers disagreed with the text, while bookmarks show what chapters they favoured. This image from a 12th-century manuscript is remarkable because it generates a particularly close connection to the past: it clearly shows a reader’s thumb print, which is extremely rare in medieval books. The fingerprint invites us to undertake a CSI-style investigation. The black colour of the ink, as well as the silvery shine it has, indicates this is printing ink, likely from the age when printing had just started in Europe. Why did this early printer not wipe off his hands before thumbing through the book? Did he not respect the object, which must have looked very old-fashioned to him? I love it how all of these questions are generated by a casual gesture of an individual some 500 years ago, who thumbed through the book with dirty hands.

Pic (my own): Leiden, University Library, MS BPL 127 A (12th century). This blog shows other examples of getting up close and personal with medieval readers.

Medieval whodunnit Whodunnit? Who printed this book? This collection of German works was published in 1472 by Johann Bämler of Bamburg in 1472, less than twenty years after Gutenberg invented the printing process (or at least introduced it in the...
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Medieval whodunnit Whodunnit? Who printed this book? This collection of German works was published in 1472 by Johann Bämler of Bamburg in 1472, less than twenty years after Gutenberg invented the printing process (or at least introduced it in the...
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Medieval whodunnit

Whodunnit? Who printed this book? This collection of German works was published in 1472 by Johann Bämler of Bamburg in 1472, less than twenty years after Gutenberg invented the printing process (or at least introduced it in the West). The printer’s shop employed a variety of people, from letter setter to corrector (as seen in this picture). So the question of who produced the actual text - that is: who pressed the letters onto the paper - is a legitimate one. This book is special because it gives you an unusual clue into the identity of the person handling the presses: this page, as well as a few others in the book, contains a fingerprint of the individual in question. That is where our little CSI investigation stops, unfortunately, because the pages are not telling us anything else. However, what’s so great about this discovery (made by the staff of St Andrews University’s Special Collections) is that the 541-year-old fingerprints produce an unusual connection to the past. They turn the static and somewhat impersonal printed book into an object that was made by a hardworking person - who had no time to wash his hands on the job.

Source: more about this case, including other images, in this blog of St Andrews’ Special Collections.

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