The Pecia System and the Medieval University Book Trade, ca. 1200-1340

Alison Ray, Royal Irish Academy Library

Friday, September 11, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

First employed by the Dominican Order in the early thirteenth century, the pecia system of book production soon expanded into a major commercial trade operation to supply and disseminate classroom texts and preaching aids across the universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. This talk will explore how pecia manuscripts were mass-produced at a low cost for members of the academic milieu, with surviving volumes featuring rich written and visual evidence of their active use in university activities and wider religious communities. Several illuminated pecia copies further showcase the collaboration between artists and scholars to create original decorative cycles in works of theology, law, and natural philosophy. These manuscripts continued to be circulated by readers in the later Middle Ages through the secondhand market, as demonstrated through examples of Oxford's university loan chest system and the newly rediscovered records of an Italian Jewish pawnbroker.