The experience of reading medieval manuscripts is profoundly visceral. The touch, smell, and appearance of the material object can be intoxicating, sometimes even generating feelings curiously akin to sexual desire. Yet scholars seldom discuss encounters with medieval codices in erotic terms, and many may well deny the validity of such responses. Lara Farina has observed that she 'know[s] from personal experience that when a scholar proposes an erotic reading of a premodern text she is likely to be met with the retort, seldom explained, that the given work just isn't erotic' (Farina, 2011, 50). Farina goes on to pose the rhetorical question 'What does it mean to say that something is not-and therefore cannot be-erotic?' before pointing out the illogical assumptions behind such claims, including the conviction that the 'erotic component of an artefact' is somehow 'prior to and independent of the act of reading/viewing'-in other words, that such erotic responses, whether they be to texts or objects or both, are instinctive and involuntary rather than discursively constructed. While not primarily concerned with the erotics of reading manuscripts per se, this Special Issue puts forward innovative methodologies through which the manuscript page begins to emerge as a desiring surface saturated with queer jouissance and excess, and on which error and deviance