ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century scholars who set out to identify, date and describe, in one form or another, the 50,000 fragments in the principal collections of the Nordic countries that belong to two archival groups worked mostly by grouping together the identifiable fragments from the same manuscript. This chapter presents three case studies concerned with a group of fragments from fifteenth-century manuscripts whose origin is cathedral cities, one in Norway and two in Sweden. The single most important feature for the present purpose of the three groups of fragments is the presence of cadel initials. The fundamental need for the recognition and reconstruction of fragments in one or more collections into books is the identification of individual scribes. One notable feature of the fragments in case studies is the apparent absence of evidence of continuity of production. Fragments from other manuscripts with similar cadels include an Uppsala antiphoner, a gradual and a missal.
