A reproduction of Saint Matthew from the Book of Kells, a manuscript that is a linchpin of Irish identity. Photograph by Historical Picture Archive / Corbis via Getty

The second time that the Book of Kells was stolen, in 1874, it was, as Christopher de Hamel explains in his new book, “Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts,” simply a misunderstanding. By then, the thousand-year-old text—a richly illustrated gospel book containing the earliest surviving Western manuscript image of the Virgin Mary—was held at Trinity College in Dublin. The librarian there decided to bring the book to the British Museum, to get some advice about rebinding. But he didn’t really tell anybody. The book’s “disappearance” caused a stir in the press, perhaps because the last time it had been stolen, by Vikings or similar miscreants, in 1007 A.D., it was recovered stripped of its binding and muddied by sod after eighty days—twice as many, de Hamel notes, as Christ spent in the Wilderness. The thieves had only wanted the gold on the outside.

The story of the Book of Kells is one of twelve that de Hamel, the manuscript keeper of the Parker Library at the University of Cambridge, tells in his book. Each chapter is a sort of visitation with a celebrity—with de Hamel as our guide, we turn the pages of the Morgan Beatus, the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, the Hengwrt Chaucer, the Copenhagen Psalter. Again and again, de Hamel takes us into the reading room with him. “I have no vocabulary to define this, but there is a curious warm leathery smell to English parchment,” he writes. We learn that the oldest complete version of the Latin Vulgate weighs about the same as a Great Dane, and that the pages of the Gospel of Saint Augustine tend to “curl up alarmingly,” recalling one of “those paper fish one used to buy in joke shops, which you placed on the warmth of your open hand and which then curled to indicate whether you were in love.”

De Hamel is a man of extraordinary erudition and easy charm; his book asks many questions of the past, and invokes many mysteries. Its most engaging enigma centers on worth. Though all of the manuscripts that de Hamel meets are, in fact, remarkable, there is wild variation in the security procedures that protect each one. As de Hamel sits supervised by a hawklike librarian, or alone behind a photocopier with a priceless treasure, one can’t help but think of the Book of Kells alone in the mud, discarded like garbage. What gives a book its value?

These days, the security arrangements around the Book of Kells are “as complex as presidential protection undertaken by the secret services of a great nation,” de Hamel tells us. Bernard Meehan, the keeper of manuscripts at Trinity, explains to de Hamel that “it would be inappropriate to allow it into the reading-room,” given the book’s pricelessness. In order to see the book, de Hamel must sit at “a circular green-topped table, prepared in advance with foam pads, a digital thermometer, and white gloves.” He is not allowed to turn the pages himself. De Hamel writes that after he showed Meehan an early version of the chapter describing this process, Meehan “begged me not to describe too precisely where we had looked at the volumes of the precious manuscript.”

De Hamel has a rather different experience encountering the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete Latin Vulgate, and therefore the best witness to St. Jerome’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into Latin—a text of incalculable value for the Catholic Church. The book was manufactured in England at the end of the seventh century, in the community of the Venerable Bede, but by the ninth century it was in the possession of the Abbey of the Saviour, near the Tuscan lava dome Monte Amiata, hence the name. The Abbey was closed, by the grand duke Pietro Leopoldo, in the seventeen-eighties, and the book was sent to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, in Florence, where it resides today. When de Hamel arrives to see it, he walks past a cloister and a garden—“I am sure that the fruit trees are oranges but my guidebook asserts them to be pomegranates,” he writes—to the library office, where he finds two women chatting. They summon a man in jeans, who leads de Hamel to a “little room evidently used for photography,” where de Hamel nestles among “camera stands, filing cabinets of microfilms and a photocopier.” The man and a colleague point to “a trolley with a bulky shape under a blanket. ‘Amiatina!’ they declared.” De Hamel is left with the book, “entirely unsupervised,” joined only “by the occasional person who wandered through to use the photocopier.”

Why is the oldest surviving version of Catholicism’s most important text condemned to life under a blanket, while the Book of Kells lives behind glass like the Pope in his Popemobile?

As with all things, the answer is political. The Book of Kells became famous in the nineteenth century, during the Celtic revival. The book was made in Ireland and is associated with a Saint Columba, who lived in the sixth century and died just as Saint Augustine came to Canterbury, from Rome, to convert Britain. The Irish nationalists who took the Book of Kells to heart were subverting the centralized power of the Catholic Church, located in Rome for centuries. The Book of Kells came to symbolize Irish cultural heritage; in contemporary visual shorthand, the looping interlaced patterns on the Book of Kells’s “carpet pages” are synonymous with the term “Celtic.” James Joyce described the book, in a letter to the gallerist Arthur Power, as “the most purely Irish thing we have.” Like Joyce, the Book of Kells is a linchpin of Irish identity and thus a key element in the political matrix of its nationhood. (Also, like Joyce, the Book of Kells has appeared on currency.)

The Codex Amiatinus, in a strangely symmetrical kind of opposition, belongs to a nation overflowing with historical legacies. It was ecclesiastical property, then it was the property of the Medicis, who built the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which was designed by Michelangelo. It now belongs to the Italian government. Amiatinus is undoubtedly a priceless treasure in Italy, but it is a priceless treasure among countless priceless treasures. You might compare the contrasting attitudes of the Italian and Irish librarians to the parenting styles of two mothers, one with many robust offspring and the other fretting frenziedly over her only son.

Last December, Sierra Lomuto, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about a conference she had recently attended on medieval manuscripts. “One panel, whose aim was to highlight medieval and modern connections by way of material culture, included a presentation by a tattoo artist who translates Celtic iconography from medieval manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, into body art,” Lomuto recounted in a guest post on a blog for medievalists. As the tattoo artist’s work was projected before the audience, Lomuto noticed that “every example was etched into white skin.” Someone in the audience asked about the motivations behind the tattoos, and “the artist explained that her clients are white people looking for a heritage to celebrate during a time when ‘being white is bad.’ ”

Lomuto went online and found a forum, on the white-nationalist Web site Stormfront, where someone had asked for counsel concerning tattoos. A respondent suggested that the poster seek out the work of the tattoo artist who had spoken at the conference, and also pointed out “that Celtic crosses work better for tattoos because they are not as obvious as a swastika.” Lomuto, in her blog post, notes that the role of Celtic iconography role in white-nationalist organizations “was never explicitly referenced” during the speaker’s talk. (She also mentions that the conference took place the same weekend as “Become Who We Are,” a conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the National Policy Institute, a white-supremacist “think tank” led by Richard Spencer.)