Bound to be Rebound: Fates of Latin Manuscripts in Late Antiquity

The reutilisation of books for the production of other books is a phenomenon whose origins certainly go back to those of the book itself, made up of complex and varied dynamics, which, over time, have given rise to different and multiform solutions. This contribution focuses on the reuse of Latin papyrus and parchment manuscripts in codex bindings between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages from the ‘extended’ Mediterranean basin. Their origin, provenance and morphology is very different from case to case, involving sources not necessarily only in the Latin language and script. The phenomenon concerns a wide, multilingual and plurigraphic area that finds some significant points in common in the techniques of codex manufacture and the phenomena of reuse.