‘People Will Use Me’

Abstract

The fourth chapter investigates manuscripts as evidence for those who came across these books and used them to make communities’ histories more permanent. A major function of books as holders of information—information often seemingly irrelevant to the main text copied into the volume—illustrates the importance of particular kinds of manuscripts to their owners, their institutions, and their regions. The writing of names and legal documents into Gospel-books, in particular, demonstrates the shift of the book’s function from transmitter of knowledge to repository of collective memory, akin to the phenomenon of large family Bibles. This becomes of particular importance when what is added in the recording of notes is among the earliest writing in a language, such as the Welsh additions in the St Chad Gospels.