Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

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Fascinatingly, the Mediterranean-coloured pictorial squares of the Parker Library manuscript are said to resemble the primitive-looking narrative cycles of religious scenes found in Ethiopia’s orthodox churches. A former librarian of Parker Library at Cambridge and cataloger of illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby’s, de Hamel brings extensive expertise to his meticulous examination of 12 celebrated manuscripts created from the sixth to the 16th century…The book is sumptuously illustrated…A rare, erudite, and delightfully entertaining history. Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s leading palaeographers … In this splendid new book he has numerous fascinating, scandalous, funny and gloriously entertaining tales. Encountering an original medieval manuscript is in some ways like encountering a famous person, says De Hamel. We may all pretend that a well-known celebrity is no different from anyone else, and yet there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature.

With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden “character” of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. The German composer Carl Orff turned the document’s blocky, black minuscule into a numbingly insistent piece of ersatz medieval folk (used years later in the Old Spice ad), of which the Nazis were very fond. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use.

Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books, translated into numerous languages, including A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, The Book in the Cathedral, and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is an extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts. He traces the elaborate journeys which these exceptionally precious artefacts have made through time and space, shows us how they have been copied, who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell), how they have been embroiled in politics and scholarly disputes, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and luxury and as symbols of national identity.

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Despite the colloquial style, Hamel (as you would expect a professor of Cambridge) really knows his stuff. The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of Middle English literature, was copied down by Chaucer’s scribe Adam Pinkhurst; though the parchment is grievously damaged, it marks the earliest attempt to circulate Chaucer’s tales in 14th-century London.Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is, like each one of the 12 treasures it celebrates, a book of marvels. These books, patricians of parchment, have circulated in European society at the very highest level for centuries. Of the 12 manuscripts investigated by him in his delightful, absorbing book, only one – the medieval Hours of Jeanne de Navarre – is preserved today in the country where it was created. Jeanne de Navarre's ''Hours'' was made for the 24th-century French queen and later owned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

He reveals a stupendous discovery has made about this book that no one had noticed in its centuries on this earth.The language is unfussy and untechnical, and really Hamel should do a podcast or audiobook of this because I think it would be fantastic (although viewing the photos of manuscripts is necessary I think). Perhaps most important in discussing this magnificent work is to assure you that the overarching erudition is rendered clearly and with great kindness to you, his companion. A little of this mystery clings to their pages: when de Hamel takes the Gospel of St Augustine (pictured in the Economist) to a service in Canterbury Cathedral he notices that its leaves are so light they flutter and hum in time to a hymn, as if the sixth-century manuscript . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.