What Is: Chemise Binding

When looking at the picture of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor's mother, she has a book open on the stand in front of her.  It appears to be lying on a kind of cloth and fastened with some kind of clasps.  In fact, that's just what it was.  Books were valuable in Medieval times.  They were treated as treasured keepsakes.  An elaborate leather binding protected hand-printed and hand-illuminated pages of vellum (calf skin) or parchment (untanned animal skins).  The book could then be clasped or even locked and the whole thing wrapped in a rich cloth covering, rather like a modern dust jacket in a library.  Books bound this way were exceptionally rare and expensive so few of them have survived to this day.  They can now be found in museum collections.