It is impossible to know where obsessions start.
Was it as I first practised my own teenage signature in curly script, exaggerating the swoop of the ‘y’? Or first turned the pages of a book on Giotto in my local library? Or carefully calligraphed and illustrated all the poems in Yeats’s early volume The Rose as a gift for my new husband?
By then, I was 22 and fatally mesmerised by the glitter of ornate initials, rich blue and red pigments, and the hypnotic swirls of acanthus in wide, riotous margins.
My English degree required the study of Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English and Later Middle English and I became entranced by reproductions of manuscripts in my textbooks.
What hand made those marks on animal skin?
