One of the most influential investigators of English manuscripts in the twentieth century, N. R. Ker spent his life locating and tracing the contents and history of every medieval manuscript available to him in public and private libraries and museums in England. His catalogues and descriptions of those works are of immense value to all scholars of English from the Anglo-Saxon period through the age of early printing. His methods of physical analysis influenced future practices of codicology in manuscript studies. He was fascinated by the manuscript as a history in itself, an empirical testimony of antiquity illuminating the story of the Middle Ages.

Ker was a member of a generation of paleographers who revolutionized the discipline of manuscript studies, a fraternity that also includes Kenneth Sisam, Richard W. Hunt, Roger Mynors, Otto Pächt, J. R. Liddell, and Robert Delaissé, all from Oxford, and M...