10 Books That Will Change the Way You Think About Books
Or: a brief tour through the manuscripts that were locked up, burned, buried, and occasionally used as evidence at a trial
Having written a few books lately about books, and currently writing a novel about a highly dangerous book, I’ve been thinking a lot about, uh, books. Specifically, about what a book can be. Turns out the range is vast. There are books were - and still are - chained to the wall. Some were not written down for years because they were so dangerous, but instead memorised, then copied out in secret, at night, by people who knew they could be executed for doing it. Some were confiscated, locked in Vatican vaults, buried with their owners, or set on fire in public squares while a crowd cheered.
Books are problematic in 2026. You’ll know, of course, about the vileness of AI thieving books and pumping out sloppy versions like some kind of processed goo. Books are still being banned and burned, but history shows us that “dangerous” books tend to survive, and often more stubbornly than the people who tried to destroy them.
The manuscripts and texts listed below aren’t on any school syllabus. A few of them have no definitive author. One of them might be a hoax. One of them was used as a manual for torture. One of them was written by a woman who had absolutely no business writing anything at all, by the standards of her time, but she went ahead and did it anyway, in the margins of someone else’s book, in a hand so small it took five centuries to notice.
The books changed the way I think about what a book is. Not just a kind of vessel for information or a story, but as an artefact, an object with a body, a history, and a political ideology. Something that was made by a hand, carried across borders, hidden under floorboards, argued over in courts of law.
1. The Voynich Manuscript (c. 1404–1438, author unknown)
Voynich MS, with naked women all over the place
Let’s start with the one that nobody can actually read.
The Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page illustrated codex written in an unknown script that has defeated cryptographers, linguists, AI systems, and approximately one million enthusiastic amateurs since it surfaced in the early 20th century. The illustrations are botanical (plants that don’t match any known species), astrological, and - in one particularly baffling section - full of tiny naked women bathing in what appear to be interconnected tubes.
Nobody knows who wrote it, what language it’s in, or what it means. How fun. Carbon dating places it in the early 15th century. It’s housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where you can view it in full digitised glory and feel the unique despair of staring at something that is clearly saying something and refusing to say it to you.
What it changed for me: the assumption that texts are for reading. The Voynich might have been written to be unreadable. A performance of secrecy, perhaps? A book whose entire meaning is its own illegibility. Who knows.
2. The Malleus Maleficarum (1486, Heinrich Kramer)
This book made a book impact on me, but not really in a good way. Here’s why.
The Malleus Maleficarum (trans. The Hammer of Witches) is the 15-century manual that codified the persecution of women across Europe. Written by a Dominican witchfinder called Heinrich Kramer, the book argued that women are all potential witches, that witches liked to steal men’s penises (I’m serious) and that the correct response to this fact was torture followed by burning.
It is one of the most dangerous books ever printed. A prime example of batshit-crazy, 100% unhinged navel lint, reading it is like watching someone build Ikea furniture while dropping acid. Unfortunately, many people with the ability to burn witches took it very, very seriously.
However, the story of its inception is what really captivated me. Kramer accused a woman named Helena Scheuberin in 1485 of being a witch and worked hard to have her executed as one. He had almost limitless power; he could do what he liked. He had dozens of other women (and two men) under house arrest as possible witches. But Helena fought back, and she didn’t stop fighting until she had him kicked out of town. Kramer was absolutely seething about it, so he poured out all that venom into the Malleus Maleficarum. What this book is, then, is the revenge manuscript of a rejected man, toppled off his pedestal by a mere woman. All the misogyny in his book is sadly - and eerily - contemporary, six centuries later.
What it changed for me: the relationship between text and power. Books don’t just reflect the world. They make it. My novel about Helena - The Last Witch - is published in paperback in September, and you might like it. Just saying.
3. The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430–1440, Margery Kempe
The first autobiography written in English was written by a woman who couldn’t actually write.
Margery Kempe - a 15-century woman from Norfolk - dictated her life story to two scribes, neither of whom were entirely sure what to make of her. She had 14 children. After her last child she almost died, and had what seems (on hindsight) to be postpartum delirium, during which she had visions of Jesus. These made her renounce sex, leave her husband, and live as a nun. She travelled to Jerusalem, to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, to Gdańsk, which was remarkable for a woman back then. She was brought before Church authorities multiple times and accused of heresy. She talked her way out of every single one.
I love Margery, and I’m so grateful someone decided to play ping pong one day in 1934, because the ball rolled into a loft where a discerning ping-pong player came across a pile of very old books. One of them was Margery’s book.
What her book changed for me: who gets to have interiority. Medieval women were not supposed to be subjects. Margery Kempe made herself one anyway, in a form - autobiography - that didn’t officially exist yet.
4. The Picatrix (originally Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, c. 10th–11th century, author unknown)
The Picatrix is a grimoire. A vast Arabic compendium of astral magic, translated into Latin in 13-century Spain at the court of Alfonso X, it contains instructions for summoning planetary spirits, recipes for talismans, and some preparations involving ingredients that I will describe only as extremely specific and leave it there. Medieval scholars called it the most complete manual of magic in existence. The Church agreed with this assessment and banned it.
The thing about book banning is, it tends not to work.
What it changed for me: the category of forbidden knowledge itself. The Picatrix sits at the intersection of astronomy, philosophy, medicine, and magic, categories that medieval scholars didn’t always distinguish the way we do now. The dangerous book and the scientific treatise were sometimes the same book.
5. The Book of the City of Ladies (1405, Christine de Pizan)
Christine de Pizan was a professional writer in 15-century France, widowed young, supporting her children and mother with her pen, which makes her either the first professional female author in European literature or a historical miracle.
The Book of the City of Ladies is her response to centuries of misogynist literature. She builds, allegorically, a city populated entirely by great women from history and legend, assembled brick by brick against the accumulated weight of men who had written about women’s inferiority. It is formally elegant and absolutely furious.
What it changed for me: the manuscript as argument. Christine was writing against other books - against Boccaccio, against the Romance of the Rose, against the whole tradition of men writing women’s nature as though they knew. The book as counter-inscription.
6. The Codex Gigas (13th century, author unknown)
The Codex Gigas - the Giant Book - is the largest medieval manuscript in the world. It’s roughly the size of a dinner table and weighs more than my 18-year-old son. It contains the complete Latin Bible, various medical and historical texts, and, famously, a full-page illustration of the Devil, which earned it the nickname ‘the Devil’s Bible.’
According to legend, it was written in a single night by a monk who had broken his vows and made a deal with Satan to complete it before dawn, in exchange for his soul. This is - maybe - not true, mostly because scholars estimate it would have taken one person 20 years to produce.
It was looted from Prague by Swedish forces in 1648 and currently lives in Stockholm, where it has been ever since. The Czechs have been asking for it back for centuries.
What it changed for me: the book as relic, a prestige object in itself, a symbol of spiritual power.
Definitely not designed for carry-on luggage.
7. Daemonologie (1597, King James VI of Scotland)
A king who writes a witch-hunting manual. That was James VI of Scotland - who would become James I of England, patron of the King James Bible, and the man for whom the Gunpowder Plot was designed - wrote Daemonologie in 1597 as a direct intervention in the witch trial debates of his age.
James believed, personally and fervently, in witches, at least at the time he wrote this book. Having had a bit of bad weather on a trip back to Scotland after picking up his Scandinavian bride, he became convinced that the reason his ship almost sank was because witches wanted to kill him. At North Berwick, he personally presided over the trials over hundreds of accused witches. He watched women tortured into confessing that they had raised storms to sink his ship and danced with the Devil .
Arguably, Daemonologie is a tiny bit influenced by Malleus Maleficarum.
What it changed for me: who gets to write the authoritative text. James wasn’t a theologian or an inquisitor; he was a king. And that was enough - more than enough -for his book to become the method by which women were tried and killed. Power doesn’t need expertise, right?
8. The Stockholm Papyrus (c. 4th century AD)
The Stockholm Papyrus is a collection of ancient Egyptian recipes for dyeing textiles, making fake gemstones, and also faking gold and silver. It’s a craftsman’s manual, written in Greek, concerned entirely with practical deception: how to make something cheap look expensive, how to pass off one material as another.
It’s the opposite of sacred. It’s grubby and vehemently commercial.
What it changed for me: the assumption that old manuscripts must be profound. This one is a handbook for con artists. It’s fab.
9. The Devonshire Manuscript (c. 1530s, multiple authors)
A manuscript passed between courtiers in the court of Henry VIII, filled with poems, some by Thomas Wyatt, some anonymous, many by women whose names we don’t know, written, copied, annotated, and argued over in the margins.
The marginalia are the thing. You can watch people respond to each other across the pages: underlining lines, adding comments, copying out a poem and then crossing it out. It’s like a WhatsApp group thread.
What it changed for me: the manuscript as social space. Not an object but a practice. Something that happened between people.
10. The Red Book (Liber Novus, 1914–1930, C.G. Jung)
Carl Jung spent 16 years filling a big red book with visions, convos with figures from his unconscious, and his own elaborate doodles - painted in a style deliberately reminiscent of medieval manuscripts. He kept it private for almost his entire life. It wasn’t published until 2009, nearly fifty years after his death.
The Red Book is one of the strangest documents in the history of psychology. It is also, quite genuinely, beautiful: a trained scientist teaching himself to illuminate manuscripts, as though he needed a form to capture what he was experiencing in his mind. He taught himself calligraphy, and painted. He wrote in gothic script by hand in a folio-format book the size of a family Bible. Why? It’s an interesting question, because surely a notebook would have been enough. A journal. But nope - a massive red book with a really artistic approach to capturing some deep thought.
What it changed for me: the permission to make something for yourself. A book nobody was supposed to read, made with extraordinary care. The private manuscript as the most honest thing a person can write.
The novel I am currently writing features a narrative set in a French scriptorium in 1237. Something that I find fascinating is how a medieval book was a body.
Not metaphorically. Honest-to-god blood and guts. The Voynich is written on vellum, which is scraped, stretched, and dried animal skin. The Codex Gigas consumed the processed hides of an estimated 160 donkeys. The pages of the Book of Kells, that other famous Irish miracle of the scriptorium, are so fine you can see the follicles where the calf’s hair grew. Medieval scribes worked with quills cut from feathers, ground pigments from insects and minerals and crushed lapis lazuli, mixed their ink from oak galls and iron sulphate and gum arabic. The red in an illuminated initial might be vermillion; it might be red lead; it might, in some cases, be made from ground mummy - the powdered remains of Egyptian bodies, used as pigment across several centuries of European art without anyone finding this especially remarkable.
So: a book was assembled from the dead. Skin and bone and feather and mineral. It took months, sometimes years, of a single person’s life. A medeival scribe might copy for 6 to 8 hours a day and produce 2 to 4 pages. Eyestrain, back pain, and genreal whinging are found in the margins of medieval manuscripts, scribes writing deo gratias at the end of a text with the palpable relief of a person finishing something that nearly finished them first. One Irish scribe wrote in the margin: my hand is weary, my sharp quill is not steady, my slender beaked pen juts out a jetblack draught of shining dark-blue ink.
Dude, I feel your pain.
In 2026, books are made of wood pulp and petroleum-based ink and industrial binding glue, produced in print runs of thousands, remaindered, pulped, recycled. They cost less than a coffee. They weigh nothing. You can carry five hundred of them in your pocket.
I don’t say this to be sentimental about old things. I say it because the materiality mattered. It mattered that a book was rare, and costly, and made of something that had once been alive. It made the act of reading into something that felt more like handling a relic than consuming content. These were objects you approached differently. Some were chained to their lecterns not to imprison them but because they were too valuable to risk losing. Some were kissed, and some books had shrines. That’s how important they were to the world back then, the actual object itself. A shrine. Some were processed through the streets on feast days. Some were buried with their owners because the idea of separating them was unthinkable.
The books on this list ask you to think about what a book actually is before it was a commodity, before it was a file, before it was a unit of content delivery. When it was a thing made by a hand, from a dead body, for a purpose that was sometimes sacred and sometimes dangerous and sometimes both at once.
If you enjoyed this, check out my books about books: The Lighthouse Witches, The Book of Witching, The Last Witch, and my forthcoming novel The House of Cursed Daughters
This was SO fascinating! Thank you for curating such a wonderful list. Now I’m off to check out YOUR books! 😁💜📖
I read the Margery Kempe book last year. How that woman survived all that crying I'll never know. I have Jung's Red book on my TBR. I'm reading a Demonologia right now, but a different one.