A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail in the footsteps of Lynette Roberts

The librarian in the purple blazer opens the large grey archive box on the desk in front of me. Instead of the stunning fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript I thought I had ordered, my eye moves over clinical glass vials filled with dust and fibres, slithers of animal glue, nail fragments, splinters of wood, neat boxes labelled as ‘remnants’ of ‘band ends’ and ‘head bands’, sewing threads and sample materials, and a Perspex folder of cannibalised strips of leather. This box carefully itemises the detritus removed from the manuscript during its restoration in 2009. In place of a manuscript, a box of relics and fragments surviving from the manuscript’s collapse, its assisted disintegration.

Do all manuscript restorations involve the careful archiving of dirt and waste material encountered in the process? This is not a manuscript, but its visceral remains; an archival reliquary box for the absent body of the manuscript, once crafted from the flayed skin of an animal. The librarian in the purple blazer is a little taken aback – ‘Oh’, she says.

Before I arrived at the National Visual Arts Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum, there was nothing I was more afraid of than this: being exposed as the sort of medievalist who doesn’t know how to work with manuscripts. The sort of medievalist who would, for example, order the restoration box and not the manuscript. I have been waiting, expecting, to be denied access, either at the point of request or the point of arrival, and at multiple points along the way as I got lost in the V&A’s galleries ...