In 1584 Edmund Roberts had just a few months to live. A devout Christian, the book of hours that he used every day to guide his prayers was old and worn, with extra texts crammed into spaces that had originally been left blank. Against one such text Edmund added an approving note: ‘I youse thys prayer well every day’. The prayer in question had been written into the book by his father, Thomas Roberts, who had died in the reign of Henry VIII. The book had been second-hand even in his time; in fact, it was very old, having been produced in the last decade of the fourteenth century. This longevity of medieval books is one of the points I explore in my new monograph, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation, which is concerned with how medieval manuscripts went on being read after the Middle Ages. I argue that a preoccupation with periodization which has separated study in the fields of history and literature into ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ has led to an entrenched blindness about cultural continuities across those periods, and that nowhere is this more detrimental than in studies of reading and intellectual influence. Edmund’s book was a parchment manuscript, not a paper printed book. Although printing was becoming well-established in England by the late sixteenth century, people were still just as likely to access their reading material in manuscript format. Through a forensic examination of the eight medieval manuscripts that were owned and used by members of the Roberts family across the period 1470-1585 my book demonstrates that readers continued to value all kinds of texts long after the era in which those works had originally been composed. In the reign of Elizabeth I members of this Middlesex family sought legal advice from Registrum Brevium, the standard medieval legal textbook; their spiritual needs were met by devotional texts that had been written more than a century before the English Reformation; and if they needed a cure for toothache or nits or phlegm they turned to their handwritten collection of fifteenth-century medical remedies. Doubtless there were new printed books as well in Edmund Roberts’s library but these have not survived. Parchment is tougher and intrinsically more durable than paper, but the family’s manuscripts also possessed added value. Records of births are inscribed in the leaves of some of these medieval books, and these lists were kept up to date until late in the seventeenth century. This habit of reusing old books for the new purpose of documenting family history undoubtedly protected the books themselves since, as anyone who has inherited old books from a relative will know, the volumes we feel most obliged to keep are those which contain personal inscriptions and ancestral information. We are entranced by the possibility of making tangible connections with the past, and in this we are no different from our sixteenth-century predecessors.