In an exhibition of manuscripts from Anglo-Norman England held to mark the thirty-sixth Battle Conference, the Eadwine Psalter (Trinity College, MS R.17.1) held pride of place as one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Norman book production. It was made during the mid-twelfth century by teams of scribes and artists working in collaboration at the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, and contains a triple psalter together with liturgical calendar and canticles, each psalm accompanied by a Latin psalter gloss, prologues and collects, Old English and Anglo-Norman interlinear translations, and pictorial illustration. A decade or so after the book was completed, various additions were entered on blank leaves at the end, including the famous full-page portrait of the monk-scribe Eadwine (fol. 283v) and, extending across a double-opening, a coloured pictographic drawing of the entire monastic complex (fols 284v–285r), including a depiction of the pressure-fed, piped water system newly installed by Wibert, prior of Christ Church from around 1153 to 1167. This was the opening chosen for the exhibition, rotated 180 degrees to return the drawing to its original orientation, with east at the top. The plan is of exceptional intrinsic interest, but the choice of opening was also intended in part to exemplify the subject of this article: the relationship between a community’s books and the settings within which they were used. The study of monastic architecture in England over the past few decades has both advanced our understanding of the chronology of building and adaptation of architectural structures, especially at the earliest Cistercian foundations, and encouraged consideration of the relationship between the structures and the spaces they enclosed to liturgical and other aspects of monastic practice.This article introduces a further dimension to our understanding of the monastic precinct and the religious observance it served by focusing upon the role of books within communal practice. It aims, in particular, to draw attention to the number and range of books that were used for the oral delivery of readings to the community as a whole within each of the various parts of the claustral complex, and to the relationship between the programmes of readings delivered as part of the customs associated with each physical space.