Books written and decorated by hand are possibly the densest self-contained repositories of cultural information of any objects created by humans during the pre- and early modern eras in Europe. As subjects of art-historical study, however, illustrated and decorated manuscripts conceal an untold peril for the image-loving researcher: the danger of treating painted elements in isolation from the immensely rich stories embedded in any manuscript’s non-pictorial elements—materials, physical construction, scripts, scribal hands, textual contents, and even DNA. This course introduces graduate students to the study of manuscripts as whole objects, with first-hand analysis of medieval and early Renaissance illuminated codices. The first part of the course lays a foundation for the study of individual codices through weekly units on codicological information and methods, the development of Western European manuscript production and book hands over time, and examination of important examples through digital copies available online. The latter half of the semester is devoted to the study of specific manuscript genres and to student research. Pandemic situation permitting, some class meetings will take place in historic libraries in Rome and in Umbria for first-hand study of historic codices.