Medieval illuminated manuscripts get pulled out of storage and into the light at an exhibition inside Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, and art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon walks through the cases explaining what made these books valuable enough to kill over: gold leaf, crushed lapis lazuli, and hundreds of hours of a scribe's labor bound into a single volume. Germaine Greer joins him to talk through the religious and political weight these objects carried, arguing that a Book of Hours or a royal psalter was as much a display of power as any castle. Illustrator Quentin Blake offers a working artist's eye on the pages, pointing out the draftsmanship and page composition choices that still hold up centuries later. The camera stays close on the manuscripts themselves, tracing individual brushstrokes and marginal decoration that rarely gets seen this clearly outside a conservation lab. The film treats the exhibition as a way into a bigger question: how a handmade object became one of the most potent status symbols of its era.