Weareable books : a thousand years of history
Le Porte Mémoire
Long before screens and cloud storage, handwritten books were among the primary tools for storing and transmitting knowledge — from liturgical and devotional works to legal, medical and scientific texts. In medieval Europe, this knowledge typically took the form of the codex: gatherings of parchment or paper sheets sewn together and protected by a binding in leather, wood or parchment. (1) These books were expensive to make, but they were also durable, designed to travel through time and sometimes through space, following their owners on the road.
Left : Porte Mémoire – Maison Douillet, 2025. | Right : Detail of laid paper pages of the ‘Porte Mémoire’.
Madonna of Canon van der Paele (detail). Jan van Eyck, 1436. The detail of this amazing painting evidences a clergy member holding a girdle book.
What is a medieval girdle book?
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a small, portable book format now known as the girdle book (or livre de ceinture in French) appeared in several European regions. (1) A girdle book is characterised by a leather cover that extends beyond the lower edge of the boards into a long, tapered tail, usually ending in a knot, hook or ring. This tail could be slipped through a belt or girdle so that the book hung upside down; when lifted to the hand, it was immediately in the correct orientation for reading. (1)(6)
Modern research — notably the work of book historian Margit J. Smith — has identified only around two dozen surviving medieval girdle books, a very small number compared to the tens of thousands of manuscripts that have come down to us. (1)(6) These portable volumes appear in art on the belts of monks, nuns, clerics and lay men and women, often as a sign of devotion and literacy. (1)(6) Many surviving examples contain religious texts: breviaries, diurnals and above all Books of Hours, private prayer books designed for daily use by people who did not belong to a religious order. (1)(3)(6)
These books were not “mass objects” in the modern sense, but they did serve a broad literate public with the means to commission or purchase a manuscript: members of religious communities, clerics, and lay men and women for whom a girdle book could be both a practical tool and a visible status symbol. (1)
Calendars, "Bat Books" and portable time
Alongside classic girdle books, medieval Europe also produced other forms of portable manuscript designed to be worn or carried on the body. The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves three small folded manuscript calendars, now known as bat books. (2) These are long strips of parchment folded concertina-style, each leaf carrying parts of a computus or calendar system used to calculate dates, lunar cycles and liturgical feasts. According to BnF curators, these miniature calendars were probably worn at the belt or carried on journeys, to avoid transporting heavier volumes. (2)
French historian Fañch Kermorvan has shown that such “livres à la ceinture” could be assembled from folded leaves sewn together, then enclosed in a leather cover with a loop or ring to attach them to the belt. (4) Some functioned as multi-year calendars, allowing the owner to compute the date of Easter over a span of seventy-six years; others combined practical information in a vade-mecum format. (2)(4)
These objects remind us that medieval books were not only containers of text, but also instruments for managing time and orientation in the world: tools for knowing where one stands in the year, in the liturgical cycle, in relation to the phases of the moon. In that sense, a girdle book or bat book is both a physical object and a small, portable model of the universe its owner inhabited.
Detail of a calendar contained in a wearable « bat book » (c. 1350, BnF). The drawing explains a method for calculating the date using the hand.
A girdle book. The knotted part is attached to the belt.
Books, bodies and the work of memory
In the later Middle Ages, the Book of Hours in particular became a kind of “bestseller”: museums and libraries describe it as the most widely produced illuminated manuscript type of its time, used by lay families for private devotion. (3) These volumes often combine sequences of prayers with calendar pages listing saints’ days, feasts and other key dates. (3)
Some Books of Hours were even bound as girdle books, explicitly designed to be worn, consulted on the road and protected from weather or theft by their extended cover. (1)(3)(6)
Books of Hours, girdle books and bat books all participate in the same logic: concentrating essential information — prayer, time, calculation — into a compact volume that stays physically close to the body.
Seen from today, these manuscripts illuminate an older form of “personal data”: names of family members listed in calendars, local feasts, obligations, routes, devotions. They are not encyclopedias; they are highly selective. What is written into them is precisely what must not be forgotten.
The Porte Mémoire: a contemporary wearable book-object
Maison Douillet’s Porte Mémoire situates itself in this history of wearable and portable books, while remaining firmly rooted in contemporary design. It is a miniature hand-bound book-object made to be worn against the chest on a knitted linen cord — closer to a small pendant than to a pocket notebook. (5)
The piece uses natural goat parchment for the cover, aged linen threads for the sewing and attachment, and laid paper for the interior pages. It is bound “à la Lyonnaise”, with a front closure and a gansed side attachment on the fore edge, and fabricated in Isère, France, as a unique object. (5)
Rather than multiplying storage capacity, the Porte Mémoire deliberately restricts it. Like a very small girdle book or bat book, it is designed to hold only a few lines at a time: a name, an address, a date, a fragment of thought. Its function is not to replace digital tools, but to reserve a physical, visible place for what someone decides to keep close to their own body — a contemporary gesture that quietly echoes these earlier companions of prayer, time and memory.
Maison Douillet – Porte Mémoire, 2025
Source :
1 : Margit J. Smith, The Medieval Girdle Book, Oak Knoll Press / Oak Knoll Press & related papers, oakknoll.com, academia.edu
2 : Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Les bat books” and “Manuscrits médiévaux”, bnf.fr
3 : The Metropolitan Museum of Art & other museum essays on Books of Hours, “The Book of Hours: A Medieval Bestseller”, metmuseum.org; “The Medieval Bestseller: Illuminated Books of Hours”, getty.edu; “The Medieval Top Seller: The Book of Hours”, clevelandart.org
4 : Fañch Kermorvan, “Des livres à la ceinture”, blog.kermorvan.fr
5 : Maison Douillet, product page “Porte Mémoire”, douillet.com
6 : “Girdle book”, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdle_book