Sentence Completion

Complete the sentence with ONE word from the passage for each blank.

In medieval Europe, monks copied books entirely by hand in rooms called scriptoria. The work was slow and exhausting, and a single decorated volume could take a year to finish. Scribes often added small complaints in the margins about cold hands or poor light. To protect these costly manuscripts, libraries sometimes chained the books to their shelves so that readers could study them but never carry them away.

Scribes worked in rooms known as , and valuable books were often secured to shelves with a .