The illuminated manuscript is easy to misread as luxury. The floral borders, the painted miniatures, the red rubrication that punctuates columns of dense black script — these look, to modern eyes, like ornament. Like excess. The assumption is that the decoration exists to display wealth, and that the text is the real content while the image is the frame around it. Both assumptions are wrong. The border was not decoration in the sense of being separable from the content.