Lots of Fragments from Sweden: A Representative Sampling of the Manuscript Books of One Medieval Realm?

Abstract: What proportion of medieval manuscript production has survived to our day? To what degree are the existing manuscripts representative of what there once was? How we answer such questions conditions our assessment of medieval book culture in fundamental ways, whether we are looking at the reception of a single text or seeking to generalize about literacy in the Middle Ages. Yet, while comments on the significance of the survival question are commonplace in scholarship, in-depth explorations of the topic remain relatively few. What is more, existing studies have often adopted a universal perspective, seeking to generalize about all kinds of manuscripts and all of the Middle Ages, and have been based principally on manuscripts surviving as intact codices. In this essay, questions of manuscript survival and representativeness are instead approached via a corpus of about 27,000 manuscript fragments preserved from one geographical region, i.e., the medieval kingdom of Sweden. Particular attention is given to the potential of this fragment corpus to shed light on the book collections of parish churches. The essay draws attention to the importance of the fragments and the need to employ various and mutually complementary methodological approaches when studying manuscript survival.