That's a rather nice hand that Willibrord had!

And to clarify, nota bene, I don't mean this thread to denigrate the journalist who wrote the news release. This is all just to put things into perspective: there are so many amazing medieval manuscripts out there to find. This is one exciting story, but there could be many more!

There are many other ways we could be more capacious about how we count medieval manuscripts. My point is, to invert the quotation that I started with:
Documents and books from the Middle Ages are *not* rare.
It's no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of thousands waiting for our attention.

Considering the scope of the global Middle Ages, we could also talk about manuscripts (handwritten documents & books) from even farther out from Western Europe, written in languages like Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, & many more.

Outside of Western Europe, we would need to conisider the many Byzantine manuscripts written in Greek, or others in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Geʽez, Hebrew (also in W Europe), Slavic languages, Syriac, & so on.

That number doesn't include manuscripts written in languages besides Latin, or manuscripts written after the 10th century--& after the 12th century, there was a boom in scribal activity, producing dozens of thousands more--or manuscripts from outside of Western Europe.

In terms of some numbers that we can estimate (from manuscript catalogues), 18,000+ manuscripts written in Latin in Western Europe survive from just the 6th-10th centuries (see Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production, esp. tables 5.4 & 5.5).

Many congratulations--this looks like such a fantastic book! (& I know it will be because I've heard/seen your work on this subject before.)

(But also so so so bad that all of our LMS stuff is through Amazon?!?)