I’LL NEVER FORGET MY FIRST encounter with a manuscript. It was a summer afternoon, almost 25 years ago, and I was sitting in the reading room of Worcester Cathedral Library. It was pure luck that I was there, really. A few days earlier, I had bumped into the canon librarian as I was coming out of my last A-level exam; and when I mentioned that I was hoping to read history at university, he had offered to show me the collection.
The first manuscript he took down was a volume of Franciscan sermons copied some time in the fourteenth century. If I’m honest, my memories of the manuscript itself are a little hazy. I was too wide-eyed with excitement, too ashamed of
