The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass

[RenegadeHealer]

There's a great deal of tabular data in medieval documents: tax records, real estate transactions, obits, accounts, calendars, canon tables, indexes, wappen books, moon charts, pledges, easter-calculation charts.

Obituaries were sometimes written in variable-sized blocks on several parts of a folio at different times by different people.

It may not relate well to blocks of different sizes and shapes (especially if some are diagonal), but the general notion of groups of data added at various times on various parts of the page certainly existed.

At least that part is not an anachronism, then. 

I remember visiting one of those historical villages once, which attempted to replicate everyday rural life in Colonial America. There was a bookbinder there, and to this day I still remember one thing she taught me: For most of their history, the majority of bound paper books were personal notebooks, and thus were bound empty. Before the industrial revolution, many literate people carried a notebook / diary around to record all sorts of important information they didn't want to forget. But this postdates the widespread production of affordable paper. Back when the only writing surfaces were parchment, wax tablets, and chalkboards, none of which were cheap or plentiful, does our concept of a "notebook" generalize to anything a literate person would have known?

I'm likely going to flesh out this notebook theory into its own thread eventually, but not before I read up on the history of the notebook, and look for specimens of the medieval European equivalent which have been digitized.