Like Chaucer's narrator, we too look eagerly upon books written with old letters: one of the characteristics of current research in medieval studies is a renewed attention to the manuscript book as a material object whose physical structure, ink, parchment or paper, sequence of adjacent texts, annotations and other traits can constitute guides to the cultural roles that the book played and to questions of ownership, readership and interpretation. To mention just two examples, much has been learned about the circulation and transmission of Arthurian historiography, as in Lister Matheson's study that inventoried the more than 240 manuscripts of the Prose Brut, catalogued most of them in detail, and sorted out the versions; and many individual manuscripts have been shown to preserve information from which the interests of medieval readers can be inferred, as in Elizabeth Bryan's analysis of the red lettering, including faint traces newly recovered, that reveals a rubricator's marking of ‘potentially sensational Arthurian material especially surrounding Guinevere’ in the Otho manuscript of LaƷamon's Brut. But much remains to be done, and in this paper I should like to explore the use of manuscript evidence in interpreting Arthurian narratives of questing, especially in the English historiographical tradition.