The steady stream of books on medieval manuscripts addressed to a popular audience over the past two decades coincides with the advent of tablets such as Amazon's Kindle. As the flatlands of the digital realm encompass more of life, nostalgia for a tactile realm of reading, whether in the making or the perception of artifacts, asserts itself, as does the desire to immerse oneself in the real space of the conventional book, as opposed to the virtual yet denatured spaces of the metaverse. No accident, then, that, following an introduction that gestures toward medieval subjects and to readers other than Christian, Wellesley's engaging, if episodic, account of medieval manuscripts (published in the United States by Basic Books as The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts) opens with a prologue in which she recounts her hands-on visit to a parchment maker, during which she tried to slough the...

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