A scribe or printer undertaking to reproduce a text faced the task of reproducing or supplying features that would help a reader navigate that text. During the period between 1350 and 1500, readers came to expect in an English book several elements that would either facilitate reading or help a reader find particular passages or topics. These elements included headings for parts of a work such as chapters or books (headings which this essay will also refer to sometimes as rubrics or as incipits and explicits); litterae notabiliores or ‘capital’ letters; paraphs; ‘running heads’ at the tops of pages to identify a text or part thereof; various kinds of marginal material which identified topics, speakers, sources translated or authorities cited in the text, which simply highlighted passages of special interest or (less often) which provided direct commentary on the text; and, in more expensive books, borders which, like headings, indicated part-divisions.

In an influential essay, M. B. Parkes has shown how the origins and growing popularity of these features related to large cultural changes in the renaissance of scholarly learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as new ways of reading, the rise of universities, the production of new kinds of books which compiled material from many sources and the composition of encyclopaedic works. The page came to be designed in ways that clarified the division of a work into parts and also the relationship of several kinds of writing that might appear on the same page.