Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600. Heather Bamford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. xii + 258 pp. $75

Even twenty-five years after John Dagenais called for a new ethics of reading among those who deal with manuscript culture, many of us—in our preparation and use of scholarly editions or our coding and digitizing of texts—continue to evaluate the idiosyncrasy and variability of medieval sources according to a single reductive measure of wholeness or fragmentation. Bamford explores this proposal through a range of case studies, all drawn from the Iberian tradition, including epic poetry (chapter 1); the fate of manuscripts of chivalry texts upon the advent of print (chapter 2); the circulation and variation of final romance kharja (exit) verses within Andalusi Muwashshahāt (Arabic or Hebrew strophic songs) (chapter 3); the use of text fragments as apotropaic objects, such as inscribed stones, charms, and building materials (chapter 4); and the practice of compilation and reuse of sources among Moriscos (forcibly converted Muslims) in sixteenth-century Spain (chapter 5). In other cases, such as in the survival of fragments of chivalry novels within the bindings of early printed versions whose widespread popularity rendered those manuscripts obsolete, recovered fragments “overcome the shortcomings of being partial and inert and . . . come to serve as metonymies of their wholes” (81).