I have just been inspired by a TV program to show you three books that I tried to photograph at Buckland Abbey last week. The program, The Century that Wrote Itself, sets out to trace ‘our modern sense of self back to when ordinary people first took up the quill’. These books were not written by ordinary people, but one at least would have been written with a quill.

This one is my favourite and its the oldest, a medieval Antiphonal from Italy in the late 14th century. An Antiphonal is a winter choir book giving the sung parts of the service for each day from the first Sunday of Advent to the feast of Pentecost.