DRM - Medieval Style

[LongBlade]

This is a cool article discussing the various ways libraries and book owners ensured their books remained theirs.

It also explains the clanking chains in the Hogwarts library that was sometimes vexing to sneaking around.

The least subtle but most effective way to keep your books safe was to chain them to a bookcase. Walking around in a "chained library" is an unreal experience (Fig. 1). There is nothing like seeing a medieval book in its natural habitat, where the chains produce a "cling-cling" sound when you walk too close to them – a sound that must have been familiar to medieval users of chained libraries.

Considering these two practical theft-prevention techniques – chaining your books to something unmovable or putting them into a safe – the third seems kind of odd: to write a curse against book thieves inside the book. Your typical curse (or anathema) simply stated that the thief would be cursed, like this one in a book from an unidentified Church of St Caecilia: "Whoever takes this book or steals it or in some evil way removes it from the Church of St Caecilia, may he be damned and cursed forever, unless he returns it or atones for his act" (source and image). Some of these book curses really rub it in: "If anyone should steal it, let him know that on the Day of Judgement the most sainted martyr himself will be the accuser against him before the face of our Lord Jesus Christ" (source).

Book curses appear both in Latin and the vernacular, including in non-Western traditions, like Arabic (example here). Fig. 7 shows an Anglo-Saxon curse from the second half of the eleventh century, in a manuscript donated to Exeter Cathedral by bishop Leofric. This combination (of curse and donated book) is encountered more often. The inscription at the bottom of the page in Fig. 8 notes that the book was donated to Rochester Priory in Kent by Ralph of Stoke. The notation ends with a short book curse.

More, with pics, at the link: http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combating-book-theft-in-medieval-times/