Pamela Porter: ‘The dog that barked in the night': The codex, clues and curatorial conundrums

Caring for manuscripts as a conservator entails maintenance of the physical well-being of codices through the application of skills and technical knowledge, drawing on the latest findings of scientific development.

Conservation work seeks also to tap the expertise of the curator for information on any `hidden' features of a manuscript - provenance and historical significance, for example - that may have a bearing on the type of treatment to be carried out. Utilizing the end results of curatorial labours to inform their professional decisions, conservators sometimes express curiosity as to how their scholarly colleagues (working for the most part in relative isolation) actually spend their time in order to reach such conclusions.

This paper sets out to satisfy some of that curiosity, taking as a particular example the wide ranging and complex difficulties involved in producing a modern catalogue entry for an illustrated 16th-century German military manuscript in the collections of the British Library.