Fragments of Devotion and Devotion to Fragments

A Professor of Medieval English Literature Responds to the Barber’s New Exhibition

The Barber’s stunning new exhibition Fragments of Devotion: A Sensory History of Illuminated Manuscript Cutting explores the sensual appeal of illuminated manuscripts. It takes us on a journey from the medieval origins of these gilded, exquisite devotional aids to the nineteenth century when the finest quality images were sometimes cut out and collected as desirable fragments. The online format of the exhibition enables us to explore a wide selection of fragments, mainly drawn from collections at the Barber and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each fragment is presented online with an image and useful brief notes about content, source, date, and provenance. Scroll down and the image appears again with a magnification facility. Magnifying the online images makes visible smaller, delightful, intriguing details.

“Magnifying the online images makes visible smaller, delightful, intriguing details.”

Highlights from the Exhibition

Highlights from the exhibition for me include a stunning image of Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to protect the infant Jesus. Generous margins around the picture of the Holy Family are filled with luxuriant fantasy foliage that twirls, twines, and gleams.  Another illustration depicts the story of St Justina (Giustina) of Padua. The saint (already with a halo?) coolly confronts her persecutor Maximian while soldiers and courtiers look on menacingly. The image is framed by a letter M, brilliantly constructed with architectural columns that divide the space between the soldiers and the courtiers, and the saint and her tormentor.

In another fragment the letter F forms a chapel in which is St Clare is admitted to the Franciscan order, her fine clothes cast aside on the floor (and no halo in sight). It is hard to see the form of the letter here, such is the realism of the depiction. In another fragment a large letter A is decorated with a pair of jesters whose hybrid bodies terminate in pigs’ trotters. Does the jester on the left wear spectacles? And beneath the jesters, what are the weird creatures that emerge from a strawberry plant and face each other, one looking fearsome, one fearful?

“Many fragments are sometimes the only pieces that survive of what must have been large books.”

Fragment Detectives

Many fragments are sometimes the only pieces that survive of what must have been large books. Detective work is needed to investigate what kind of book they might have come from and where they were made. Language, script style, decoration, materials, iconography, and text can all provide clues. Sometimes it is even possible to locate other pages from the same book. Once a market developed for manuscript images in the later eighteenth century, dealers could make more profit breaking up a book and selling it by the leaf than selling a whole volume. This means that several fragments from a given book may be out there still, waiting to be found.

Here digital technologies are helping enormously. Digitisation of holdings by institutions and publishing of images on the internet can be crucial in the search for other leaves. There are some remarkable discoveries. According to Lisa Fagin Davis, David Gura, the Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Notre Dame, has located many pages from an early fifteenth-century Book of Hours from Brittany that was broken up and sold as fragments relatively recently. He found some of them for sale on the auction site Ebay. Today, my search for ‘Medieval Manuscript Leaf’ returned 281 hits.

The Rise of Fragmentology and Digital Discovery

Reuniting, digitally or physically, the pages of beautiful books that were broken up in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries is only one of the research missions to which fragmentologists are devoting their attention. Fragments of every kind – no matter how fine or how scrappy – are of huge research importance.

Other processes that produced fragments – and led to their survival – are also attracting attention. Fragments of old books may be recycled as flyleaves, leaves that protect the front and back of the bookblock, in both manuscript and printed books. They are also found as supports that protect leaves from the sewing thread used to gather sections of books together. They were even used to pad soft bindings for other books. Fragments found in such places can tell us much about historic book production, changing literary tastes, the provenance of volumes, and so on. For example, small fragments of the medieval poem the Proverbs of Hending were used to pad the medieval binding of a preaching handbook, alongside bits of accounts, sermons, and other pieces. This kind of re-use tells us something of the declining popularity of this once widely read poem. I’m exploring this further in a forthcoming academic essay ‘The Transmission of Proverbs: Three Lost Hending Manuscripts’, in Philology Reimagined: English in Transmission.

“We are in a golden age of fragment discovery and interpretation.”

It is rare these days for a whole manuscript to be newly discovered but fragments are being discovered all the time now that their importance is recognised. The scale of the material and the challenges of interpretation are spurring digitally-assisted collaborative projects. The website Fragmentarium hosts digital images of fragments to enable researchers and curators to ‘catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them’. The Lost Manuscripts Project led by David Rundle is a pilot catalogue of fragments found in British books.

The sensual appeal of illuminated specimens and their value to post-medieval collectors are only part of the story of fragments. With digital technologies, online publication, and major collaborative research projects, we are in a golden age of fragment discovery and interpretation. Devotion to fragments continues.

Wendy Scase

Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham

About the author:

Wendy Scase is a specialist in medieval English language and literature with strong manuscripts, archival, and interdisciplinary experience. Her work addresses questions that trouble the conventional boundaries between literary and other discourses, and is informed by the belief that medieval textual research can contribute to cultural history and enrich theory and practice in English studies.

Published 1 September 2025