Manuscripts have something of the appeal of drawings. They bring you closer to the creative process. Even a copy adds something special to the text: an editorial twist, a decorated initial, a margin full of beasts or just a beautiful script in which every letter is fashioned by hand like no other. Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right.
I specialise in the most unpoetic kind of manuscript: administrative records of military and political history. But even they speak to us directly. ‘You fool — Norwich is inland’ is the supervisor’s marginal note on a 14th-century clerk’s suggestion that ships could be found there for the king’s service. ‘I can’t go on writing this stuff in this perishing cold,’ an accounts clerk complains on a windy plain in Flanders as he tries to record the expenses of Edward III’s first continental campaign.
Many manuscripts perished in the tide of religious iconoclasm, along with the monasteries that housed them
Of all works of art, manuscripts are the hardest to exhibit.
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