Manuskript- og librarsamlingen

I høst fikk Manuskript- og librarsamlingen en stor gave fra Mette Brekke, datter av billedkunstner Hans Jacob Meyer. Gaven inneholdt bøker og arkivmateriale som har vært i billedkunstnerens eie. Blant annet mange bøker om kunst, utstillingskataloger hvor verk av Meyer eller hans bekjente har vært med som en del av utstillingen, brev, bilder og et lite utvalg skisser.

This calendar ends as a tribute to its own day-by-day fragmentariness, where many books begin again: in fragments.

What survives here is not a volume, but leaves that were cut, reused, reassembled, misaligned. Pages that once belonged to complete liturgical and devotional systems now persist as remnants, detached from their original order, carrying traces of use that exceed their initial purpose.

One fragment preserves part of the Canon missae, printed in Latin, with a large hand-painted initial opening Te igitur. It was later folded, repurposed, and used as binding material. A prayer meant to structure the most sacred moment of the Mass becomes structural support. Liturgy turns into an infrastructure of time. In many ways, across different cultures and religions, it still does.

Other fragments originate from Der Heiligen Leben, printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1488. Saints’ lives once circulated as a carefully organised sequence, aligned with the liturgical calendar, divided into summer and winter sections. Here, that order has collapsed. Leaves are trimmed. Some woodcuts remain uncoloured, others carefully painted. Text and image do not always coincide. In one case, the bottom of a printed page is pasted directly onto a woodcut, as if to ensure that the saint is correctly identified, even after the book itself has been dismantled.

These are acts of repair. They show readers and binders trying to restore legibility after dismemberment. To match image and name. To compensate for loss. To make sense again. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they misalign the order entirely, presenting pages in reverse sequence. But the effort, like memory, remains visible.

What these fragments teach us is not how books fail, but how they survive. They reveal a world in which reuse was not a sign of disrespect, but of care. Where old pages were not discarded, but folded into new structures.

Ending this Advent calendar with fragments feels precise. It is oriented toward attention. Toward holding together what can still be held. Toward recognising that memory is often carried by what remains at the edges: a cut leaf, a misplaced image, a prayer reduced to support material.

These fragments ask for responsibility. They remind us that history is not what survives intact, but what continues to be handled, reassembled, and cared for, even when it no longer fits its original form. A little bit like Advent.

Happy holidays to everyone, and thank you for reading.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/fragment/ubb-ms-2156-b.html
https://marcus.uib.no/instance/fragment/ubb-ms-1550-2.html

This is a book that wants to organise time.

Printed in Venice in 1481 by Erhard Ratdolt, the Fasciculus temporum was conceived as a universal chronicle, but also as a visual instrument. History here is not told through narrative flow, but through alignment: lines, columns, diagrams, genealogies. Time is laid out horizontally, as if it could be grasped, memorised, stabilised.

The copy preserved in Bergen makes visible how unstable that ambition always was.

The volume is bound in recycled parchment, fragments taken from a medieval breviary already worn by liturgical use. Pages that once structured sacred time, the repetition of saints’ days and prayers, are folded around a book that attempts to contain the time of the world. Old devotional rhythms are not discarded, but repurposed, pressed into the service of a new temporal technology. Time, like Advent, always repeats itself, and technology is always there, counting, hovering, threatening.

Inside, the margins are dense with marks. Manicules point insistently to certain passages. Underlinings gather attention. The note “sodoma gomorra” appears as a thematic marker rather than a quotation. It functions as a reader’s alarm system, a way of flagging moral collapse within the long flow of history. Or perhaps as a forbidden sign of recognition. After all, it takes one to know one. Other annotations guide the eye to birth dates of authors, to moments of origin. History is read here as emergence as much as decline. What matters is not only what happened, but when, and how beginnings can be located, named, remembered.

Then, on f. 64r, a sentence interrupts the chronicle almost gently:

Et impresores librorum multiplicantur in terra.
And the printers of books multiply on the earth.

This line registers a shift. The chronicle becomes aware of its own conditions of possibility. The medium marks itself inside the message. The multiplication of books is noted as an event within history, not outside it. Time is no longer only recorded; it is accelerated, duplicated, disseminated, already moving toward something like liquid modernity. Materially, the book carries further signs of instability. The first quire is loose. The binding bears a blind armorial stamp deliberately abraded, an ownership erased without fully disappearing. Even authority leaves residues when it tries to withdraw.

I am struck by how appropriate this feels for Advent, almost like a travelling concept. The provenance itself traces a slow itinerary: Bernard Quaritch in London, Helmut Tenner in Heidelberg, Harald Engebretsen, who purchased the book in 1974, and finally its donation to the University of Bergen Library in 2025, where it now forms part of the Bibliotheca Landaasiana.

Waiting, in this book, is not empty or silent. It is full of annotations, warnings, recalibrations. Time hesitates, folds back on itself, accumulates debris. Sacred pages are reused. Ownership is overwritten. History is held together provisionally.
This Fasciculus temporum teaches us how humans have tried, repeatedly, to make time legible, knowing that it would always resist being fully contained.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Årets siste Spesialglimt i På Høyden.
Her gir vi dere en liten romjuls-challenge!
🎄🥕🥮

Liker du å bake? I førjulstiden er det ofte de gode gamle oppskriftene vi henter frem, gjerne de vi selv har vokst opp med.

After books shaped by accumulation, reuse and endurance, today’s object reduces the codex to its most elemental form: a single leaf. Librar BLL Q 43 is a vellum leaf from the Decretum Gratiani, printed in Mainz in 1492 by Peter Schoeffer, one of the most important printers of the fifteenth century and the former collaborator of Johannes Gutenberg. What survives here is not a book, but a fragment that once formed part of a monumental juridical structure.

The leaf measures 475 × 332 mm and is printed on both sides in four columns of approximately 50–52 lines in Schoeffer’s Gothic type. Its layout follows the standard glossing architecture of the Decretum: the authoritative legal text in the two central columns, surrounded by marginal commentary in narrower outer columns. Law here is not linear, but spatial. Authority unfolds through proximity, annotation and hierarchy on the page. Rubrication is extensive and contemporary. Red and blue initials, alternating paragraph marks, and rubricated section headings like D.V, D.VI, D.VII… that structure the text visually and intellectually. Printed guide letters remain visible beneath several initials, exposing the collaboration between press and hand that defines early legal printing. The leaf corresponds to Distinctio V–VI, including canons such as Cuilibet sacerdoti…, confirmed through comparison with the Munich digital copy and the ISTC record (ig00362000)
This fragment survives in an unusual form. It was originally issued as part of the bibliophilic publication Two Essays on the Decretum of Gratian by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and Charles McCurry, in which each copy included a genuine leaf from Schoeffer’s 1492 edition. The earlier provenance of the leaf is unknown. Removed from its original codex, it was later recontextualised as an object of scholarly reflection and connoisseurship. The leaf thus carries at least two lives: one as functional legal text, another as curated fragment.

Encountered during Advent, this object sharpens the questions raised by the previous days. If the Bible presented itself as totality, and sermon books as texts shaped by reuse, this single leaf confronts us with authority without completeness or what does it mean for a canon to be fragmented. The Decretum Gratiani was foundational to medieval canon law, yet here its authority is concentrated in a fragment. This leaf is a reminder that fragmentation, non-normativity or q***rness is not always the result of loss. Sometimes it is a later strategy of preservation, study and display. The archive, once again, appears not as a neutral container, but as an active agent that cuts, extracts and reframes.
Tomorrow, we move further into this fragile territory, where the boundaries between book, fragment and trace begin to dissolve entirely.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

After the monumental completeness of yesterday’s Bible, today’s book moves us into a very different register. Librar BLL 2 is a folio incunable containing the De Sanctis section of Meffret de Meissen’s widely circulated sermon collection, Sermones, alias Ortulus regine de Sanctis, printed in Basel by Nicolaus Kesler, not after 1483. Where the Bible aimed at totality, this volume insists on repetition, reuse and adaptation. It is a book designed not to be finished once, but to be returned to again and again.

The Bergen copy preserves 197 leaves, printed in two columns of fifty-five lines in a dense Gothic textura quadrata. A single hand-painted initial survives on A2, a modest gesture of decoration at the threshold of a text meant primarily for performance rather than contemplation. What makes this copy particularly striking is the evidence of long, layered use. The margins carry extensive later annotations in both Latin and English, alongside ink tests, scribbles, and pages that have clearly been washed, perhaps to remove earlier notes or to prepare the paper for reuse. These traces suggest not neglect, but sustained engagement. The sermons were read, adapted, corrected, and re-inscribed across centuries and confessional contexts. This is not a static medieval object, but a book that continued to work long after the Middle Ages had ended.

The binding tells a similarly complex story. The volume is housed in a nineteenth-century full calf binding, decorated with blind and gilt tooling, red edges and French-style marbled endpapers. The leather on the spine is now lost, exposing the hand-sewn supports beneath and making the structure of the book unusually visible. A printed note on the pastedown records a re-arrangement in 1913, likely carried out while the book was held at Markree Library in Ireland, in the hands of Bryan Cooper, politician, bibliophile and part of a literary circle that included W. B. Yeats. From there it passed through the Bibliotheca Lansdåsiana before arriving in our collections.

This history matters. The sermons of Meffret were among the most widely disseminated of the late fifteenth century, and this copy reflects that popularity not through pristine preservation, but through accumulated handling. Its pages have been altered, cleaned, rebound and reorganised, yet the text persists. Authority here is anchored not in fixity, but in endurance. Read during Advent, BLL 2 reminds us that preaching was always a practice deeply linked to perceptions of time. Sermons moved with the calendar, place and audience; they absorbed new languages, new hands, new concerns. The physical book bears witness to this movement. Its washed pages, missing leaf and exposed sewing structures turn this exemplar into a record of transmission under pressure. Like many of the books in this calendar, it was meant to function as a mirror, yet what it reflects most clearly is the labour of reuse itself.

Tomorrow, we continue toward even more fragile forms, where the boundary between text and fragment becomes harder to sustain.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book is the largest object we encounter in this first week of Advent: a Latin Bible printed in Venice in 1476 by Nicolaus Jenson, one of the most influential printers of the fifteenth century. Jenson’s type is often praised for its clarity and balance, and here it carries the full weight of Scripture in a monumental folio format. This is a book conceived as totality: II + 940 + I leaves, printed in two columns of fifty-four lines, designed to hold the entirety of biblical history within a single, imposing body.

The Bergen copy, Librar Q 30, is bound in an older light parchment binding, with Biblia Sacra 1476 printed on the spine. Its dimensions, nearly thirty centimetres high, place it firmly within the tradition of lectern or institutional Bibles, objects meant to endure repeated consultation rather than private reading. The typography is a dense Gothic textualis, consistent throughout the volume, asserting visual authority through regularity and scale. The initial following the prologue is richly decorated with gold and ornamental vines, while other initials are hand-painted, guided by faint letterforms left by the printer to indicate where colour and ornament should enter the page. Yet this monumentality is punctured by vulnerability. The book bears clear signs of use and exposure: a partially torn leaf ([m8]), paper repairs at the lower margin of [p1], and a hole in the upper right area of [x4], surrounded by water damage. These are not marginal defects. They mark moments where the material body of the book has been breached, handled, repaired, and allowed to continue. The Bible survives not as an untouched ideal, but as an object shaped by contact, loss and care.The colophon anchors the volume firmly in place and time: Biblia impressa Venetiis opera atque impensa Nicolai Jenson Gallici. M.cccc.lxxvj. Printed in Venice in 1476 at Jenson’s own expense, the book belongs to one of the earliest moments in which the Bible becomes fully integrated into the economies and infrastructures of print. Its authority is asserted typographically and materially, yet its transmission is inseparable from wear and contingency.

The history of this particular copy adds another layer to its material biography. It was purchased in 1976 from an antiquarian bookseller in Oslo, entering the University Library as part of a modern collecting effort aimed at stabilising and preserving objects already marked by centuries of handling. Earlier traces remain visible: crayon marks on A5, writing trials in the margins, and flyleaves made from older paper, including a handwritten Latin fragment. The archive, once again, reveals itself as a composite body, assembled across time from reuse, repair and accumulation. Encountered during Advent, this Bible stages a quiet paradox. Scripture presents itself as fullness and origin, yet the physical book insists on another truth: that history reaches us through openings, through patched surfaces, through places where continuity has been interrupted but not erased. The monumental body of the text remains legible precisely because it has endured damage. Its authority is not diminished by these apertures; it is made visible through them. A bit of what we should be celebrating these days.
Tomorrow, we move from monument to fragment, and from totality to something far more precarious.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-q-0030.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book takes us to Nuremberg in 1479, to the press of Friedrich Creussner, one of the city’s earliest printers and a figure who shaped the typographical identity of the region in the final decades of the fifteenth century. The treatise, Collecta magistralia per adventum domini de formatione hominis moralis, is a compact work on the formation of the moral human being, written for the Advent season. The author is unknown, though the text was long attributed incorrectly to Robertus Caracciolus, a Dominican preacher whose name survives, misleadingly, on the spine of this copy.

The Bergen exemplar, Librar Q 21, preserves the first printed edition of the work. It is a folio—though physically closer to a large quarto in its proportions, measuring roughly 28.5 × 22 cm. The text is printed in a single column of thirty-five lines in Creussner’s earliest semi-gothic type, a halbgotisch that already shows the influence of humanistic forms while remaining anchored in late medieval textura. The effect is narrow, angular and carefully disciplined. Hand-coloured red initials, along with other red markings on larger capitals, punctuate the otherwise regular surface of the page. The book begins with a blank folio and continues through a complex collation: A10, B–E8, F6, G8, H6, amounting to sixty printed leaves bracketed by blanks at the front and back. The volume is neither foliated nor signed, which means the structure must be reconstructed from catchwords and the logic of the sewing. This lack of signaturisation is typical of Creussner’s early production and suggests a small, efficient workshop where paratextual guidance was still emerging as a standard feature.

The colophon is unusually rich in theological framing. It explains that the sermons describe “the bodily members of the human being,” and that through them the spiritual or moral person may be formed “in imitation of the incarnation.” The treatise is therefore named a tractatus incarnationis moralis, a moral incarnation rendered in words and method. It concludes by identifying Creussner as the printer and anchoring the work firmly in 1479, followed by the customary laus Deo clementissimo.

The material history of the book reinforces these layers of formation and reinterpretation. The binding is later parchment, fitted with leather clasps. The copy was purchased in 1961 from Damm & Søn, entering the University Library as part of a larger effort to consolidate Bergen’s Manuscripts and Rare Books collection.

To read an Advent cycle on moral formation in early December is to step into a world where ethical instruction is imagined through the body: the eye that must see rightly, the mouth that must speak with measure, the hand that must act with virtue. This treatise turns physiology into pedagogy, and the year’s liturgical descent toward Christmas into a space for self-scrutiny. The incunable itself mirrors this logic. Its structure, its type, its hand-coloured initials and even its later misidentification all speak to the processes by which books, and people, are shaped, reshaped and read anew. In winter light, Librar Q 21 becomes a reminder that the moral imagination of the late Middle Ages was profoundly material. Bodies mattered. Methods mattered. And books like this one taught readers to move between the visible and the invisible, between form and formation, as the year slipped quietly toward its darkest days.
Tomorrow, another fragment, another way of sensing how knowledge survives through the hands that carry it.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-q-0021.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s incunable takes us to Strasbourg in 1486, where the printer Georg Husner produced one of the most ambitious agricultural treatises of the Middle Ages: Ruralia commoda, the encyclopaedic handbook composed by Petrus de Crescentiis in the early fourteenth century. Written for landowners, administrators and students of natural philosophy, the book gathers everything from soil preparation to viticulture, animal care and estate management. It is a manual of practical knowledge, but it is also a record of how medieval Europe imagined the relationship between land, labour and the rhythms of the year.

The Bergen copy, Librar Q 22, is a large folio. It opens without its title leaf and ends without its final blank, losses that mark a history of sustained use and later rebinding. The text is printed in two columns of forty-six lines in a compact Gothic textura, a typeface well suited to dense prose and long compilations. The colophon on [z7v] fixes the work in time and place with characteristic confidence: hoc industrioso caracteris stilo… impressum est Argentine anno domini 1486, finitum quinta feria ante festum sancti Gregorii.
In other words: the book was completed in Strasbourg in 1486, on the Thursday before the feast of Saint Gregory. The note ties the material act of printing to the liturgical calendar, reminding us that knowledge and season were never entirely separate.

The structure of the volume is intricate and regular: twenty-four quires, from a through z, most of six leaves; 146 leaves in total, preceded by three endleaves and followed by two more. Rubricated initials in red and blue punctuate the text, marking thematic transitions or new passages within the encyclopaedic whole. Some copies of this edition preserve an illustrated arbor or diagrammatic tables; the Bergen copy does not, but its typographical clarity and rubrication guide the reader through its architecture. Water damage is visible throughout, a reminder of how easily books that describe the management of the natural world can themselves bear the marks of it.

The provenance of the copy deepens its sense of movement. It belonged to Uppsala University Library, and was given to Bergen in 1961, on the occasion of the inauguration of the new University Library building. On the second flyleaf, a note signed by Per Gustaf Abraham Hierta and dated 1900 testifies to its earlier life in private scholarly hands. The later binding, probably added upon its arrival in Norway, holds together a volume that has travelled across countries and collections.

Reading Crescentiis in December invites a particular kind of attention. His descriptions of planting, grafting, harvesting and storing were written for a world that understood the year through cycles of work that winter interrupts but does not suspend. To encounter those pages now, as days shorten and fields withdraw into rest, is to feel the distance between agricultural knowledge and the conditions in which we receive it. Librar Q 22 stands as a reminder that books, like landscapes, carry traces of climate, labour and care, even when they arrive centuries later and far from the soil they describe.

Tomorrow, another book, another way of thinking with the fragments that reach us.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-q-0022.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book, Librar 87, was printed in 1483 in the Bavarian town of Memmingen by Albrecht Kunne, remembered in local tradition as one of Gutenberg’s students. Its title, Tractatus sollennis de arte vero modo praedicandi, names a genre rather than a literary identity: a solemn treatise on the true art and method of preaching. It has long circulated under the incorrect attribution to Thomas Aquinas, but the text belongs instead to Jacobus de Fusignano, active in the early fourteenth century, whose concise manuals shaped pastoral training long before the scholastic summa became the dominant model.

The Bergen copy does not survive complete. The first leaf is missing, so the book opens on A2, as if the instruction had already begun before the reader arrived. The treatise proceeds through a tree-like structure, the famous arbor praedicandi, whose branches organise topics, subtopics and transitions with an almost botanical logic. The printer himself confirms this in the colophon: “distinctos passus et formas arboris compilatus”, a formulation that turns the sermon into an object of method.

The book’s trajectory into Bergen is unusually well documented. It was given in 1915 to the Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum by Count Alfred von Oberndorff, the German ambassador to Norway, as recorded in the museum’s accession register (Gave nr. 1). It remained there until 1956, when it was transferred to the University Library. The current limp parchment binding belongs to this later phase, replacing whatever working binding the book carried during its first centuries.

One detail stands out in the manuscript traces: on the final page, a reader named Johannes added a devotional closing in Latin, quoting Ecclesiastes 12:13: “Omnia audita: Deum time et mandata eius observa.” The sentence reminds us that manuals of preaching were not abstract compilations of method, but instruments of practice. Readers annotated them, copied them, carried them into the pulpit or the classroom. This copy still bears faint marginal marks that speak of such use.

Librar 87 teaches us that method is itself a form of memory, a structure capable of surviving loss, displacement and new institutional homes. In winter light, its quiet pages show how knowledge persists through fragments, through transmission, and through the care of readers known and unknown.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-o-0087.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today’s book, Librar 83, brings us back to Deventer in the 1490s. It contains a small octavo printing of Horace’s Ars poetica, a format designed for portability and use rather than display. The copy that survives in Bergen is remarkably plain: twelve leaves printed in a single column of twenty-four lines, with no decoration beyond a later hand-drawn initial. Its modest scale is part of the point. Books like this were meant to circulate, to be annotated, and, in some cases, to be transformed by their readers.

This is one of those cases.

On the blank pages of the final gathering, a sixteenth-century hand copied two Latin poems. They are occasional compositions, written in a fluent humanist register, and they celebrate the solemn arrival of a Spanish cardinal named Alfonso in the city of Bologna. The verses place great emphasis on his dignity, his lineage, and his role as a protector of learning. One poem sets the scene in astrological terms, the other frames the city of Bologna as if speaking in its own voice. According to the final lines, the event occurred on the twenty-fifth of August in a year given as MCDXX, but the transmission of the date is imperfect and almost certainly corrupt. What matters more is the way the poems situate Alfonso: a Spanish cardinal, holder of the title of San Eustachio, received with ceremonial affection by a university city accustomed to honouring its ecclesiastical patrons.

This figure could have been Alfonso Carrillo, an influential prelate of late medieval Castile. The manuscript, however, never mentions that surname. It offers only “Alfonsum… Sancti Eustachii diaconum cardinalem Hispanum”, and no known Carrillo ever held that specific title. The attribution was a modern conjecture, not a historical fact. The poems therefore preserve something more intriguing: a glimpse of a Spanish cardinal whose identity has not survived in the usual prosopographical sources, and whose presence here may be the only record of a visit now otherwise forgotten.

If Horace writes about what poetry demands lie measure, clarity, proportion, the fitness of words to occasion, these poems show what a reader could do with those lessons. The humanist who copied them into this book was not illustrating Horace. He was practising him, turning a blank space at the end of a printed text into a site of literary performance. In this way, Librar 83 is more than an edition of the Ars poetica.

Tomorrow, another book, another shift in scale, another way in which early print teaches us how people once thought with and through their texts.

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-o-0083.html

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

Today we turn to a very different kind of incunable. Librar 18 is a small quarto printed in Deventer by Jacobus de Bredaaround 1489–1490, and it brings together three concise Latin texts devoted to the Virgin Mary: Sabellicus’ Elegiae XIII, Gregorius Tifernas’ Hymnus, and Maffeo Vegio’s Salutatio. These works are representative of a moment when humanist learning and Marian devotion intersected in compact, portable formats designed for personal reading.

The material structure of the book is as telling as its contents. It consists of 18 leaves arranged in three gatherings, A (8 leaves), B (6), C (4), all folded into the standard geometry of a quarto. This is a format that signals intention: small enough to be carried, yet organised with the same internal discipline as larger liturgical or scholastic volumes. The text appears in a single column of 26 lines set in a medium-weight textura. This typeface, with its regular vertical strokes, gives the page a steady rhythm and reflects broader printing practices in the Low Countries at the turn of the fifteenth century.

One of the principles of working with early printed books is understanding how they expected to be completed. Librar 18 was printed without decorated initials or rubrication, though traces of a later reader remain: a ‘C’ added on bjjv and a ‘No.’ on bviv. These are small marks, but they anchor the book in lived experience. They remind us that a printed object does not end with the press; it continues to accumulate meaning through use.

The binding is modern, almost certainly produced when the book entered the Bergen Museum collection, and attributed to local binder B. Giertsens. It tells a second story, one about institutional care and the ways collections absorb earlier materials into new systems of preservation.

The provenance of the book might be linked to one of the most significant figures of early modern Norway, Geble Pederssøn, later the first Lutheran bishop of the country. He likely acquired this volume during his studies in the Catholic Low Countries. The booklet would go on to circulate within the intellectual community of Bergen Cathedral School, where books like these shaped the formation of generations of students, including Ludvig Holberg. Its eventual arrival at the University Library reflects the long afterlife of collections that move from private reading to shared cultural infrastructure.

If yesterday’s folio Mariale showed the monumental side of late-medieval devotion, Librar 18 offers the opposite scale: a book built for close reading, light enough to travel, and structured for reflection rather than display. Intellectual history often moves through small, durable objects that carry ideas quietly but persistently across distances and centuries.

-- David Carrillo-Rangel is an archival researcher and PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen, whose work bridges medieval materiality, q***r theory, and digital culture. --

https://marcus.uib.no/instance/book/ubb-librar-o-0018.html