Books of the Medieval Parish Church

Book production became a market-orientated craft long before the invention of printing. In the late-medieval manuscript economy, the parish churches formed one of the biggest entities on the demand side. However, at present we know next to nothing about how they were provisioned with books. BOMPAC is a response to this gap in scholarly understanding.

It offers the first substantial study of the place of the parish church in the culture and economy of the manuscript book, c. 1150c.1500. BOMPACs contribution to the topic will be twofold.

It will, firstly, provide an extensive case study concering one medieval kingdom Sweden comprising more or less two modern countries (Sweden, Finland).

Secondly, preliminary research indicates that many of the books used in the parishes of medieval Sweden were imported from abroad.

Thus, the project will directly break new ground in the study of the international book economy of the later middle ages. Parish church book provision remains poorly known because such books very rarely survive as complete physical items. BOMPAC will go around this limitation by innovative use of a hitherto understudied corpus of manuscript fragments.

In Sweden, the parchment books of the parishes were recycled as covers for tax accounts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This operation was systematic and resulted in a massive collection of c. 50 000 leaves from c. 12 500 books, probably the biggest collection of material from medieval parish church books anywhere in the world. Only recent cataloguing and digitizing efforts have made this material accessible for research.

In BOMPAC, it will be studied with both statistical and palaeographical methods.

A database-driven approach is used to produce a reliable big picture of how the books were distributed in the medieval period.

Palaeographical and codicological case studies will show us the modes and routes by which parish churches acquired their books.