How Medieval Practices Inspire Modern Junk Journaling
When most people hear the phrase junk journal, they picture a modern craft: old book pages, lace, tickets, coffee receipts, fabric scraps, handwritten notes, and a little bit of organized chaos held together with glue and thread.
As I’ve fallen deeper into my own junk journaling era, I’ve started wondering a question that seems to come naturally to someone with one foot in the SCA and the other in material culture studies:
Would people in period have done anything like this?
The answer surprised me.
No, they weren’t gluing Tim Holtz ephemera onto pages or decorating with washi tape. But they were living with their books in ways that feel remarkably familiar.
Books in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were valuable possessions. They weren’t disposable, and they certainly weren’t treated as untouchable museum pieces. They were working objects.
Owners filled blank pages with family records, recipes, accounts, prayers, favorite quotations, sketches, and notes. Books were rebound, repaired, expanded, and personalized. Extra gatherings might be sewn in. Worn covers were replaced. New flyleaves appeared over the years.
But one practice struck me more than any other. People tucked things inside them.
- A flower picked on an ordinary day.
- A letter worth saving.
- A merchant’s account.
- A recipe scribbled on a scrap of paper.
- A pilgrim badge.
- A ribbon.
- A lock of hair.
These objects were often never intended for anyone else to see. They simply belonged with that book because they mattered to the owner.
Sound familiar?
That realization changed how I think about junk journals. I used to think I was creating decorated books. Now I think I’m creating containers for memory.
Recently I placed my father’s 1972 letter into an acid-free sleeve and tucked it into my family junk journal beside a photograph of my parents cutting their fiftieth anniversary cake. Neither item explains the other. Yet together they tell a richer story than either could alone.
That’s exactly what material culture is about.
Objects don’t just have meaning individually. They gain meaning through their relationships.
Years from now someone might open one of my journals and discover an SCA event program, a museum admission sticker, a coffee shop receipt from a road trip, a handwritten shopping list, or one of my apprentice’s notes tucked into a pocket.
Those little pieces of paper may not seem important today.
To a future historian, they might be priceless.
Many years ago I recreated a medieval prayer roll. I copied every section, printed it on separate sheets, cut them apart, and glued them end to end to make a full-length facsimile.
When I finally unrolled it, I stood holding it with my hands resting exactly where centuries of users had worn the edges of the original.
For just a moment, I wasn’t simply looking at history. I was participating in it. In the SCA, we call experiences like that magic moments.
Junk journaling can create those moments, too. Perhaps not today. Perhaps not even for me.
But someday someone may open one of my altered books and smile at an old coffee receipt, an event flyer, or a handwritten note because it tells them how an ordinary person actually lived.
History is often found in kings’ letters and illuminated manuscripts. Sometimes it’s also found in the things someone quietly tucked between the pages and forgot.
Perhaps that’s the real ancestor of the junk journal.
