ABSTRACT
Interestingly, the oldest layer of existing fragments of books written in the eleventh to late thirteenth centuries and used in Finland in the Middle Ages are almost totally dominated by material from outside of the Swedish realm. The overly uniform picture of Latin book culture is undoubtedly a result of the conservation history of the remaining parchment fragments: the confiscation of Latin books corresponding to certain parameters in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was a blessing in disguise. Although the history of most individual fragment leaves and the books that can be reconstructed is known only poorly, as a group, the fragments that were probably used in fourteenth-century Finland allow us to draw some careful conclusions about the development of book culture. In Finland, the number of remaining whole medieval codices used or produced locally is exceedingly low, only a couple of dozen.
