Il y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

For sport-lovers, a Book of Hours from 1540 contains the first rendering of golf, in which tiny players show off their swings. Or for romantics, there is the Petit Livre d’Amour, with the initials of the lover and his mistress appearing alongside miniatures of the lovestruck suitor. “No wonder she married him,” says Kathleen Doyle, curator of illuminated manuscripts. Just don’t ask the curators to pick their favourite. “To me, that’s part of the point. You can’t pick because there’s so much and that can be so surprising to people,” Doyle says.

Many of these books have been treasured for centuries, on a shelf or inside a desk drawer. As such, they are often much less well known than paintings from the same periods, and much better preserved. “The illuminated manuscripts contain a fantastic number of works of art from the medieval period – far more than you’d find in the National Gallery,” says Breay. Doyle agrees. “Because they are in this form, they survived.” It was a close call for some though. In 1731, the Ashburnham House fire destroyed several manuscripts and singed the only copy of Beowulf known to exist. But it lives on, a headless man adorning one of its tattered pages. “Most people who’ve studied the poem will never have looked at the manuscript … They don’t realise it’s got all these other illustrations,” says Harrison. “Every time you look at a medieval manuscript, you see something you’ve never seen before.”

©Michael Bodiam Leonardo da Vinci notebook ('The Codex Arundel') showing mirror writing and technical drawings, 1478-1518, in Italian	©Michael Bodiam The Gospel of Luke, 'Harley Golden Gospels', first quarter of the ninth century, in Latin

Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse, 'Silos Apocalypse', 1091-1109, in Latin

The Gospel of Luke, ‘Harley Golden Gospels’, first quarter of the ninth century, in Latin