Fragmenta membranea collection

Collection description

The Fragmenta membranea collection contains ca. 9300 parchment leaves which stem from approximately 1500 medieval books. The majority of the collection comes from Latin liturgical books that were used in the churches of the kingdom of Sweden in the middle ages, but there are also fragments from, e.g., legal and theological works. The Reformation made these books obsolete and, starting in the 1540s, their durable parchment sheets were put into new use as covers for tax records by the royal bailiffs. The accounts from all over the Swedish realm were originally stored in Stockholm, but in 1809 Finland was annexed by Russia and all the documents related to it were transported to Helsinki. The account books were kept in the Senate archives until the 1840s when Edward Grönblad started removing the medieval parchment covers from around the early modern accounts. A separate collection was thus formed and moved to the Helsinki University Library. All of the collection has been digitized and most of it catalogued in the Fragmenta database.