Recording medieval bindings. The role of the conservation survey, with reference to work currently under way in the library of the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai

This paper was developed from a ten-year long project in the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai which was funded by Saint Catherine Foundation (London, New York and Geneva). It was published in ‘La reliure médiévale. Pour une description normalisée’ after having been presented at the international conference ‘La reliure médiévale’. The conference was organised by the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which are government funded organisations. The published volume was edited by Guy Lanoë(Ingénieur de recherché [most senior research title in France] in codicology). The methodology presented in this work has been the subject of the Ligatus Summer School, which has been running for the past eight years. Following the publication of this article, the methodology it outlines was adopted by a number of institutions and researchers including a survey of Byzantine manuscripts in Mount Athos.