A smattering of novels has emerged in the past quarter century that stage a quest for knowledge in the low lighting and tense intimacy of a quiet study room, “unbashedly interpret the past through its material traces” and constituting a literary genre that Suzanne Keen calls the “romance of the archive.” In these books-A.

I’m far from the first person to swoon at the masses of papers, documents, and manuscripts that populate historical and cultural institutions across the globe.

Turning over folios or examining the wax seal of a medieval charter is a sensual encounter Arlette Farge calls it a “physical pleasure finding a trace of the past.” Parchment, the predominant material for medieval writing, is made of animal hide, so studying Gower’s manuscripts and life records means I’m often encountering him, literally, through the touch of skin on skin. What is it about the archive that makes us fall in love? Why is it, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, that book supports and acid-free boxes make us dream of “a romance that exceed the fictions of history-the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive”? No doubt, archival research is occasionally extremely tedious-transcribing difficult handwriting can be a more effective sleep aid than melatonin-but most of the time it’s a unique thrill. Since that day in Pasadena I’ve been talking about him breathlessly, chasing him through centuries of scholarship, tracking his records across continents in archives from California to Kent. Then at the Huntington Library one morning, my stomach fluttered when I opened the cover of a fourteenth-century manuscript of his most famous work, Confessio Amantis, to a blurry illumination of a dreaming Gower, asleep. For months I’d been reading his poems in their modern print editions with a scholarly disinterest. This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408.

Everytime you touch i get this feeling