This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.

Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 A

This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general.

Collective volume exploring connections between literacy and heresy in late medieval Europe.