I'm watching Inside the Court of Henry VIII and the historian showing Anne Boleyn's prayer book was flipping the pages with bare fingers. He did the same with Henry VIII's English bible. Last week I watched Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn: The Lovers Who Changed History, and the historian Dr Suzannah Lipscomb did the same with Anne's prayer books, which even had little love notes between the two in the margins.
I would have imagined it would be standard procedure to handle these objects-especially something as fragile and old and precious as a Queen's book of illuminations or a King's bible with gloves. Is there any reason that isn't the case?
You have inadvertently stumbled into the white glove controversy!!1 Want to make a room full of archivists fight? Ask them what they all think about white gloves for materials and then sneak out the back. But yes, she was doing the right thing (at least according to many people), and I'm sure her hands were pretty freshly washed. We do not make people handle our rare books (where I work) with white gloves, but photographs and negatives we do. I've personally ripped materials on accident while white-gloving it.
Different libraries have different policies about handling documents - and policies can even differ depending on the specific document. Modern paper, especially cheap paper, is fairly crappy. Older paper was much different, and light handling may be of far less concern than other issues that gloves pose, especially the paper being torn by encumbered fingers. Often archives are far more worried about light exposure than they are about touching, especially if the book is only handled rarely. Also, most medieval manuscripts and even many early modern manuscripts were actually printed on vellum or other types of parchment rather than paper. Vellum is just prepared skin; it's not going to be harmed by the occasional poke with a finger which is also skin, provided that nobody is excessively rubbing the pages.
I didn't see those but is it possible they were copies?