Treaty between Calicut and the Dutch, showing the Malayalam text, inscribed on a strip of gold over two metres long. India, 1691
(Picture: handout)Any exhibition called Gold automatically conjures up ideas of coins, bullion and nuggets… the commodity that is a universal language, the one that always keeps its value, which goes up when all else goes down.
Well, this is a different aspect of it: gold as a medium in manuscripts and books, letters and documents. It still conveys costliness, preciousness and value, and it still has the most extraordinary lustre… quite literally, it illuminates manuscripts. These fifty artefacts from the British Library’s extraordinary collection show how gold was used in times when the medium was the message, and the significance of a text, a letter, a bookcover, was signalled to the simplest soul with a shining element.
