At Uppsala University Library there are several thousand handwritten books. In terms of time they span 1,500 years.

The Silver Bible from the 6th century, account books from farms long gone and notebooks from modern day authors. What they all have in common is that they are bound and written by hand and so can be seen as handwritten books. Medieval manuscripts belong to this group.

Before Gutenberg, who is considered in the West to be the inventor of modern book presses with movable type (around 1440), the only way to duplicate a text was to make an exact copy by hand. At first it was often monks who copied the Bible and other religious texts, but even the  poetical and scientific works of ancient Greece and Rome have survived to our day in this way. Sometimes the texts were beautifully illuminated. Mostly they were written on parchment, i.e. the prepared skin of a goat or a calf. It was not until the 14th century that paper, a Chinese invention made of natural fibres, become commonly used for writing in Europe and the Nordic countries.

Latin was the language most used for writing in the West, but there are also medieval manuscripts in the vernacular. When the text had been written, the parchment leaves were bound between covers to form a book, originally often complete with buckles. A medieval book of this kind is called a "codex". Since it could take many months to produce a single copy, books were extremely expensive and owned by monasteries, monarchs and wealthy families.

Uppsala's most famous codex is the Silver Bible, a translation into Gothic of the four gospels.