Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

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Deeply edifying and hugely entertaining… [De Hamel’s] curiosity and enthusiasm are infectious and his dedicated sleuth-work and educated guesses are invigorating.

The binding, the layout and the lavish illustration make it a pleasure to handle before you even turn to the content, which perfectly fulfils its promise.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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. One of the cultural highlights of the autumn is an edge-of-the-seat tale inspired by Medieval Manuscripts.

An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author’s excitement…It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. 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. As he introduces us to twelve star manuscripts in their sanctuary homes, these complex creations emerge as major players in the great game of ideas and power.

Despite the colloquial style, Hamel (as you would expect a professor of Cambridge) really knows his stuff. The St Augustine Gospels, “the oldest non-archaeological artefact of any kind to have survived in England”, are housed there. It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations. I am a happier and fuller person because this fine man took me on his Grand Tour and told me so many marvelous things. 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.

With scholarly elegance, Christopher de Hamel opens the door and invites us to join him for the intellectual expedition of a lifetime…This is an endlessly fascinating and enjoyable book. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts conveys the fascination and excitement of encountering some of the greatest works of art in our culture which, in the originals, are to most people completely inaccessible.

Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge. Encountering an original medieval manuscript is in some ways like encountering a famous person, says De Hamel. With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden ‘character’ of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. Strikingly, in the Last Supper scene, the disciples are shown eating with their fingers at a low, eastern-style table.