Why study fragments?

The history of book is inevitably marked by destruction: as we all know, a great number of books has been lost in centuries for intentional causes or accidents. We are still dealing with the incredible loss of hundreds of medieval manuscripts in catastrophic events, like the WW2, but accidental destructions are not the only reason for the dispersion of books.

The intentional destruction of a medieval source seems to us a real crime, but the culture of preservation is relatively recent, and we know that our predecessors in the past centuries had no problems to dismember a manuscript that no one would read, and to reuse its parchment for fly-leaves, binding pieces or wrappers for notarial documents.

This kind of selective destruction is particularly relevant regarding the liturgical books. Liturgical books became soon obsolete, and as a consequence, most of medieval liturgical books were destroyed in order to renew the liturgical library by copying new books. In a number of cases these lost books were the only witnesses of local ancient liturgies, and they were the only sources of particular texts and music which were later suppressed. It is then clear that the study of the fragments are, in certain cases, the only way to discover the traces of the ancient liturgies.
This blog is dedicated to liturgical fragments, their text, music, and paleographical and codicological evidence. In particular, we focus on fragments kept in Italian Archives and Libraries. All contributions and commentaries to this subject are welcomed.