I recently had a chapter published in Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin (New York, 2016). My bit’s about the various fixed physical markers for navigation that we find in medieval manuscripts—tabs, string, leather balls and so on—and I think it’s rather good—although I would say that, of course.
These little objects might seem less interesting than written marginalia, and aren’t as mobile as book ribbons or as mechanically sophisticated as book wheels (see this blog post for a good quick overview of all these types). But book ribbons and book wheels could move, and almost certainly all have moved since our period, and so we can’t now use them as evidence for readers’ attention to specific parts of books. Fixed markers, however, do let us track readers’ attention, or at least to track the parts of books which they expected to want to access rapidly.
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