Newberry Case MS 153 and the Circulation of Curricular Texts

The pecia system of reproducing curricular texts in European universities is well documented, but codicological evidence in the Newberry Library’s Case MS 153, a fifteenth-century copy of Latin Aesopic fables and the first part of Matthew of Vendôme’s Tobias, suggests that grammar-school texts also circulated in individual gatherings rather than complete copies. This article examines the damage that the gatherings of this manuscript suffered before they were bound together in order to substantiate this claim, and also draws on evidence of such circulation practices for grammar-school texts in Italy that could have been known and followed in France.