Text-books may be defined as books, normally in small format, for use as teaching tools within an educational institution, organizing as well as summarizing standard material on a specific topic into a more or less systematic overview of a discipline, or a well-defined part of a discipline; this is in opposition to the large scholarly tomes on which they are based. Text-books are linked directly to the curricula of schools and universities and their history reflects the evolution of institutional teaching.

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Surviving library lists from the late Middle Ages show that university and college libraries did not contain text-books. Chained collections – as a rule not accessible to undergraduates – comprised standard texts and commentaries on them, mainly large books in folio: it would have been wasteful of space to keep small books chained on lecterns. Nor did undergraduates have access to the books in electione: those books which were available for members of colleges to select for their use outside the library. These books in any case appear also to have been standard texts in large formats. Because evidence for text-books available to students in the late Middle Ages is not to be found in library lists, because institutional books tend to survive more easily than privately owned books, and because large books tend to survive more easily than small ones, the temptation to rule out the ownership of books by individual undergraduate students should be resisted. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that text-books in the later Middle Ages tended to be owned by masters.