When we think of a medieval manuscript, we often picture an illuminated prayer book or bible. We might think of a massive book, hundreds of leaves of smooth, off-white parchment, often illuminated with gold leaf. Such deluxe manuscripts made up a small number of medieval books, being for the most part luxury items rather than those intended for frequent use. The most common working manuscripts were religious, and the most common of these were liturgical. A liturgical book might be illustrated and illuminated if it came from a well-endowed religious establishment like a monastery or cathedral, and then might subsequently serve as a ‘hand me down’ to a parish church. More often, liturgical books were less lavishly illustrated (on which, see Chapter 3). Another common type of working manuscript was that containing works designed to aid clergy in pastoral care.

In the Christian tradition, the pastor is an ordained clergyman who looks out for the needs of other Christians, primarily in the domain of the spiritual, but also in feeding the poor, ministering to the sick, and the like. Throughout the Middle Ages, learned churchmen had drawn up treatises to help clergy with the major components of pastoral care: moral guidance and the hearing of confession, teaching Christian morals and doctrine, and administering the other sacraments, those rituals like communion through which the Church administered the visible grace of God through physical processes. The sense of a need to look out for the spiritual needs of laypeople went back to the early days of the Church. Writers such as St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) had composed guidebooks for giving laypeople moral and spiritual guidance.