The last page of the book is equally telling of the manuscript's history as its first page. Due to its location, however, the end of the book contains very different information than that found on the opening page. The last page represents the closure of a book project, and sometimes the scribe wanted to provide some information about himself or the circumstances under which the book was produced. Given that medieval books lacked a title page, such explicit information is very welcome; it makes the last page an important location for historians of the book. There is another reason, however, why the last page is interesting. At the end of the manuscript we often encounter blank pages, either because the last quire was not completely filled with text, or because a blank flyleaf was added during the binding process. As we have seen when the margins were observed in Chapter 3, such blank spaces were popular locations to write on. So what do we encounter at the manuscript's concluding page?

The Last Page of the Text

The last page of the text was a podium from which the scribe could announce information about himself and his work. While few scribes seized this opportunity, this added information, collected in what we call a “colophon,” can enrich our knowledge about a manuscript considerably. Some colophons provide a glance into the reality of the scriptorium or urban workshop, where scribes toiled over their sheets of parchment. Well known are colophons that cry out “Please give me a drink!” and “Let the right hand be free from pain!” (Hoc opus est scriptum magister da mihi potum and Dextera scriptoris careat gravitate doloris). Both announcements are seen at the end of the manuscript in Figure 37, and the scribe probably meant it: the script he used is of very high quality and it must have taken him quite a lot of effort to copy this text.

Particularly telling are colophons in which a scribe opens the shutters and allows us to peek into his working space. The person who copied Giessen, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 945, which contains Justinian's Code in French translation, identifies himself as “Herneis le Romanceeur” in the colophon on the last page (fol. 269v).