This is a page from a Missal, a service book containing the texts necessary for the performance of the Mass. Professionally made books used decorative initials, such as the initial Q on this fragment, to signal the main divisions of a text. There was usually a hierarchy of initials within any book to designate sections, chapters, paragraphs and other breaks. The initials were added either by the scribe or by a specialist, in spaces left blank by the scribe. The latter was increasingly the practice in the later Middle Ages. The important initials might be historiated (that is, with a figurative picture, istoire being the term for story) or decorated. The initial on this page shows St John the Evangelist writing at a desk within a chapel. It is a visual reference to the content of the text - the beginning of the Gospel of St John.