Collegium Medievale 2007 Jan Brunius (ed.): Medieval Book Fragments in Sweden. An In- ternational Seminar in Stockholm 13–16 November 2003. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien: Konferenser 58. Stockholm 2005: Almqvist & Wiksell International. 242 pp. 67 colour plates. Reviewed by Espen Karlsen This volume contains the revised papers from a seminar to celebrate the completion of a long project of cataloguing the fragments of medieval manuscripts in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm. 1 These fragments, mostly of parchment manuscripts, 2 are preserved as wrappers around post reformation account books. This was the usual way of reusing the parchment codices of the medieval church after the Reformation. 3 The cataloguing project, called the MPO 4 project, was com- menced in 1995 and ended nine years later at the time of the seminar. The seminar assembled a group of foreign and Swedish scholars with whom the project had had contact during the project period. These scholars represent different fields for which the fragment material represents an important source. Why are these fragments of medieval books important? In Scandinavia the ma- jority of the medieval books of which there are physical evidence today, is preserved in the form of fragments. They consequently represent not only an important source, but possibly the most important source, of books used in Scandinavia before the re- formation in the sixteenth century. Most of the books were in Latin and belonged to ecclesiastical institutions. 1 The completion of the catalogue was also celebrated by an exhibition and a publication in Swedish (Abukhanfusa 2004a), which also appeared simultaneously in an English version (Abukhanfusa 2004b). 2 Paper fragments do occur, but they are rarer. Paper is not as useful for binding purposes as the far more solid parchment. 3 This reuse of parchment from books happened also outside the Lutheran area. It is in- structive that copies of, e.g., the Catholic Missale Nidrosiense (1519), the first book printed for Norway, and the Danish Missale Hafniense (1510) contain parchment fragments of large- scale 12th century liturgical books and that the last Catholic Archbishop at Nidaros used a parchment leave from a 12th century Latin Bible as a wrapper around an account book (Karlsen & Pettersen 2003, 48 with plate 3 on p. 73). 4 MPO, an abbreviation for “Medeltida pergamentomslag”, i.e., medieval parchment wrap- pers.