This needs no explanation. Manuscripts are simply entrancing. It’s partly purely their age: most of those I work with are about a thousand years old (plus or minus about 200 years). Holding something that old and extracting meaning from it is a thrill. That’s accentuated by both their physicality and the lives they contain, both of which I think are unique to working with medieval – or pre-paper – documents. These are pieces of animal skin, which you can smell, and on which you can see the beast’s hair follicles. They’ve been skinned and treated and scraped and stretched – and you can see the holes and tears where that process has gone wrong. Some of those holes have been stitched up, and you can see the thread that a hand, dead a millennium, pushed through it to hold it together. And that’s all before getting to the actual words, scratched into its surface, and the corrections – most often letters and words physically scraped away from the surface. Any medieval manuscript is an incredible thing, a living thing, a ‘hidden excitedly containing’ thing.

To answer the only question on any non-medievalist’s mind at this juncture: I wear gloves if the library demands it; most libraries don’t anymore (it desensitizes you to what you’re holding being, as I understand it, the major reason).

Then there’s the fun of visiting different libraries. This time, for me, it was the Bibliothéque nationale in Paris. I don’t speak any French, so I’ve been putting this off for ages even though it holds lots of the manuscripts I need to look at. The manuscript rooms at big libraries are usually just what you’d expect: loads of wooden shelves, leather work surfaces, and old carvings and soft light, and full of old scholars pursuing the threads of a life’s work. The Paris one is – again, as you’d expect – a beautiful place to work. And the staff were outrageously patient and helpful, despite my total inability to communicate in the language of the country I’d chosen to visit. I felt quite at home by there by the end of today, and sad to be leaving.

I worked with one fine and one magnificent book this week. My preferred approach is to spend two days with a manuscript. The first, I spend leafing through it, getting to know it a bit. If there’s another detailed description of it, I don’t usually read it until after the end of the first day. That’s partly so I come to it fresh, partly so I can keep remembering how much there is for me to learn because I’m often very very wrong in my conclusions, and partly because I’m lazy. So that first day is of pure exploration. What texts does it contain? How many people worked on it? About when and around where might they have worked? How did they decorate it? How did they put it together? Did other people leave marks of reading it afterwards? These are the questions I’m asking.

And then the second day I transcribe – that is, I copy out, as closely as I can – whatever copy the manuscript has of Saint Christopher’s story. That’s a really effective way of forcing me to look extremely closely at how the scribe(s) worked, to notice all the corrections and mistakes and weird little features to the way they operate. It also means I’ve got a bank of Christopher texts to compare with one another, but we’ll come to that another day.

In brief, because this is my first post about working with manuscripts and so it’s already a bit longer than usual, what I love the most – and the reason why Paris, BnF, latin MS 3801 was ‘magnificent’ for me – is chaotic and messy work. Like every other sentient being, beautiful and perfect projects take my breath away: I’m not an idiot; I can see the Lindisfarne Gospels knocks the pants off anything I work with. But what really gets my juices flowing is something that lots of people have worked on in different ways, where styles collide, where – even better – a novice scribe has had a go for a few lines and then been told to go away to practise on wax a bit more. That brings us full circle, really, because (for me) it’s in the flaws, cracks, imperfections, and oddities that you see the stories; where you see the lives. I like to try to imagine the conversations that happened as this object was passed from one person to another, to feel the effort involved in making letter shapes perfect when someone else is watching. Paris 3801 has a very complicated story to tell, and there’s no space to tell it here (also, I haven’t worked it all out yet), but it’s just the most unbelievable privilege to become a part of its story, to become someone else whose eyes have searched its surface, and whose fingers have felt its pages. I’m not sure how it fits any definition of utility, but it’s bloody brilliant.