At first a medieval page looks like a wall of tangled scribbles, and the early going is genuinely demoralizing.

You'll squint at one word for twenty minutes.

Then the abbreviations and letterforms slowly become familiar, and one day a line of someone's 14th-century handwriting just resolves into plain meaning. That click of suddenly reading a dead person's private words is quiet but addictive, and it only comes after a lot of staring.