Introduction
As their final project, students in Latin 10.04 Latin Manuscripts and Palaeography, worked with fragments of waste parchment that had been reused in the bindings of other manuscript codices or early printed texts now in the Rauner Special Collections Library. The waste parchment was used in a variety of ways: as a covering for the outside of the boards, as pastedowns or endleaves, as a limp binding, or cut into strips to reinforce the spine or attach the text block to the boards. In one case, all that is left is the offset of the ink from a pastedown that had been removed. The fragments come from a variety of texts: antiphonals, liturgical texts, medical treatises, legal texts, even a bestiary. Some could be identified with precision, while others could not.
Every one of these is a work in progress: in every case, there are questions unanswered: portions of text we could not read, texts we could not identify. We welcome your comments and suggestions.
We could not have undertaken this project — or offered this course — without the help of everyone at the Rauner Special Collections Library.