ROTOLO. - The books of antiquity on papyrus paper, and certain medieval parchment documents, were commonly given the form of a rotulus (volumen, rotulus), on which literary texts were written in columns arranged parallel to the length (paginae, schedae), and documentary texts in the opposite direction, without division into columns. The writing almost always occupied only one side, that is, the inner one, while the outer side served as a cover.
When one wished to read the book, it was unrolled, so that the writing appeared little by little, on a cylinder of wood or bone (umbilicus), whose ends were usually colored or gilded and vaguely inlaid. The act of rolling and unrolling was called plicare and explicare: the book unrolled and read to the end was called liber explicitus (whence the compendium explicit at the end of a work which, analogously to the incipit liber in titles, was, in the Middle Ages, taken for a verb and conjugated). The title of the work was marked on a label, mostly of parchment, which, protruding outside, made it possible to identify the text without unrolling the rotulus: sometimes it also bore the number of columns and lines of writing. The Egyptian books, on papyrus paper, were generally in the form of a rotulus. The oldest known one dates back to 2400 B.C., but it is proven that the rotulus had already been used for writing in the period of the hieroglyphs, from the fact that one of the hieroglyphs represents precisely a papyrus rotulus.
In the form of a rotulus, on parchment, wonderfully illuminated, a few rare liturgical texts of the Church are still preserved (v. ROTULUS LITURGICUS). Numerous examples survive for Hebrew texts, since the parchment scroll long remained in use in the Synagogue.
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Renzo Frattarolo