Targeted wear in manuscript prayerbooks in the context of oath-swearing

This chapter considers the kinds of manuscripts on which laypeople might have sworn oaths in the absence of a full Gospel. Whereas officials would have conducted formal ceremonies at an altar with a Gospel manuscript, those in less formal circumstances may have forgone the altar and used more accessible items, namely prayerbooks containing extracts from the Gospels, or those containing images of a Crucifixion or Last Judgment. To make this case, my methodology relies on use-wear analysis, that is, studying the patterns of wear in individual manuscripts to better understand how users handled them.