All exhibitions of illuminated manuscripts are a good thing, for the obvious and yet important reason that there are virtually no permanent displays of them: their owners keep them in protective darkness ninety-nine percent of the time, like prints and drawings. One spectacular exception is the British Museum. For fifty years or more, its visitors have been able to look at a full collection of great works, including such masterpieces as the Register of New Minister, the greatest of Anglo-Saxon pictures. Why this openness has not been the subject of conservators’ complaints (and what it says about the validity of their complaints elsewhere) is a mystery. One explanation might be that, alone of the world’s great art institutions, the British Museum has been a library as much as a museum and that, as a result, a feeling arose that the library’s books should blend into the museum’s visual display.

Manuscripts, however, are almost solely the concern of professionals.

The common invisibility of illuminated manuscripts means that different kinds of people, as well as fewer, are aware of them. Among the millions who wander through the Metropolitan Museum every year, there are a certain number whose responses turn into critical essays. These essays often show a combination of amateurishness and speculative vigor that helps give works of art a continuing afterlife, even if part of that afterlife comes from the efforts of professionals to stamp out what they find to be utter nonsense. Manuscripts, however, are almost