Summary
An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts.
Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize.
A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick!
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too.
In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell).
From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales , these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. 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.
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.
Author Notes
Christopher de Hamel is perhaps the best-known writer on medieval manuscripts in the world. In the course of a long career at Sotheby's he catalogued more illuminated manuscripts than any other person alive, and very possibly more than any one individual has ever done. Christopher de Hamel is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambrid≥ he was until recently librarian of Parker Library in Cambridge, a collection which includes many, even most, of the earliest manuscripts in English language and history. De Hamel lives in London and Cambridge.
Publisher's Weekly Review
De Hamel, a renowned British authority on medieval manuscripts, reveals his devotion to his trade in a glorious book about 12 documents, including the Gospels of Saint Augustine (late sixth century) and the Hengwrt Chaucer (ca. 1400), that surpasses its title's promise. Despite the somewhat obscure subject matter, de Hamel pulls readers in with his unmistakable passion for every facet of these handcrafted treasures. "I want to know who made them and when and why and where," he writes. De Hamel travels to far-flung archives, waits for guardians to produce a book and lay it on the reading table, and then he pauses a moment to absorb the splendor before gently opening. He sensually describes the feel of vellum pages, the joy at discovering bits of marginalia, and the frustration of trying to discover what an erasure has hidden. De Hamel details each document's idiosyncrasies while contextualizing its time and place of creation. The author shares his adventures with wry humor. For instance, his first attempts to see the Codex Amiatinus (ca. 700) were refused, though he learns that in Italy "the word 'no' is not necessarily a negative." He also shares his befuddlement during a visit to the "bewilderingly infinite" Getty Museum in Los Angeles. De Hamel's delightful book is bound to inspire a new set of medievalists. Color illus. Agent: Caroline Dawnay, United Agents. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Centaurs and dragons, Vikings and Crusaders, popes and Nazis the adventures of a paleographer can carry him or her far. As a distinguished expert on medieval manuscripts, de Hamel invites his readers to share his remarkable experiences with a dozen fascinating medieval texts. These experiences begin in the carefully monitored reading rooms where qualified patrons examine valuable old books, rooms including those found in Cambridge's Parker Library, Copenhagen's Royal Danish Library, and St. Petersburg's National Library of Russia. But the 12 medieval manuscripts de Hamel studies in these twenty-first-century rooms transport readers across the centuries to the cloisters where learned monks wrote the Latin texts and gifted painters illuminated them with stunning gold and scarlet images. After detailing the processes that created these manuscripts, the narrative traces the often-tangled events royal and ecclesiastical intrigues, political ruptures, institutional jealousies, and commercial calculations accounting for their current locations. Interested general readers will appreciate de Hamel's lucid treatment of the themes and literary techniques that mark these manuscripts as cultural milestones between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. But they will marvel at the lavish reproductions of the masterful calligraphy and dazzling illuminations that have long made the manuscripts irresistible to collectors. A must-read for anyone who values the history of the written word.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MARTIN LUTHER: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, by Eric Metaxas. (Viking, $30.) Metaxas' effort to make Luther attractive to a wide readership presents its subject as a titanic figure who rescued God from medievalism, invented individual freedom and ushered in modernity. THE STORY OF THE JEWS: Volume 2, Belonging: 1492-1900, by Simon Schama. (Ecco, $39.99.) Schama's panoramic study begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, circling around the question of whether the Jews could ever find a safe haven. Across four centuries, that quest seemed never quite attainable yet never definitely out of reach. FURNISHING ETERNITY: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, by David Giffels. (Scribner, $24.) Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through the action of building one together. MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS: Twelve Journeys Into the Medieval World, by Christopher de Hamel. (Penguin Press, $45.) A gloriously illustrated introduction to a collection of extraordinary illuminated books, conducted by a supremely learned and cheerfully opinionated guide. WHAT THE QUR'AN MEANT: And Why It Matters, by Garry Wills. (Viking, $25.) When a leading Catholic intellectual reads the Quran, especially one as attuned to language as Wills, the result is a delight. He challenges religious and secular ignorance, yielding an overview that is both elegant and insightful. THE EXODUS, by Richard Elliott Friedman. (HarperOne, $27.99.) Friedman seeks to answer, once and for all: Was there an exodus from Egypt? He insists there was, just not quite the way the Bible describes; his Exodus story is really the tale of how the people we call Levites left Egypt and joined up with the Israelites already in Canaan. WHERE THE WILD COFFEE GROWS: The Untold Story of Coffee From the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup, by Jeff Koehler. (Bloomsbury, $28.) An absorbing, almost Tolkienesque narrative of politics, ecology and economics that documents the spread of (the misnamed) Coffea Arabica. THE BOOK OF SEPARATION: A Memoir, by Tova Mirvis. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Mirvis tells an intimate tale of departure - of leaving the Modern Orthodox community that served as the inspiration for her first two novels, and of leaving her marriage too. She movingly conveys the heartache that accompanies the abandonment of one way of life in search of another. SLEEP NO MORE, by P. D. James. (Knopf, $21.) Half a dozen murderous tales from the late great crime fiction writer. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
A palaeographer's fascinating investigation of medieval culture.A former librarian of Parker Library at Cambridge and cataloger of illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby's, de Hamel (Fellow, Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge; Bibles: An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print, 2011, etc.) brings extensive expertise to his meticulous examination of 12 celebrated manuscripts created from the sixth to the 16th century. For the author, each is a portal to the medieval world, revealing the lives and times of the societies that produced them. Most are religious, and not all were illuminatedi.e., embellished with sparkling, eye-catching gold. Some selections, such as the eighth century Book of Kells"the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind," de Hamel saysand the Hours of Queen Jeanne de Navarre, from the 14th century, may be the most familiar to readers. For each artifact, de Hamel describes his journey to find it, his experience in the library or archive where he examined it, its physical details (size, material, orthography, binding), provenance, readership, iconography, and, of course, content. In the Gospels of St. Augustine, for example, he finds the words laid out "by clauses and pauses." "It is an arrangement prepared primarily for reading aloud," he adds, "which comes from a time of oral culture when most of the audience for the Scriptures was illiterate." The author deems the illustration of the Virgin and Child in the Book of Kells "dreadfully ugly," probably resulting from "inherited tradition" rather than the artist's shortcomings. De Hamel explains the particular script of the Morgan Beatus, a collection of interpretations of the Apocalypse from the 10th century, by tracing the history of Latin writing, beginning in ancient Rome. Although most manuscripts were religious, the author includes the lusty lyrics of the Carmina Burana, from the 13th century, later "set to music by Carl Orff," and one of two 14th-century copies of The Canterbury Tales, which represents "nearly everything that is reasonably knowable about the original text." The book is sumptuously illustrated with color plates. A rare, erudite, and delightfully entertaining history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Librarian de Hamel (Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge Univ.; A History of Illuminated Manuscripts), a leading authority on medieval manuscripts, has produced a veritable feast for the mind, in this work that fleshes out the lives of 12 manuscripts. The works are organized in chronological order, beginning with the St. Augustine Gospels (sixth century) and concluding with the Spinola Hours (16th century). Content includes gospels (The Book of Kells), astrological works (The Leiden Aratea), music (Carmina Burana), and Canterbury Tales (The Hengwrt Chaucer). High culture flows from every page, as de Hamel interweaves the histories of these medieval artifacts with the lives of the people that intersected with them. The author also includes -autobiographical details from his extensive experience with these rare and irreplaceable collections, including his meeting with Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Rowan Williams. The writing style is delightfully tangential, leading readers through the episodes and turns of hand that led to each manuscript's preservation through the centuries. The many full-page color facsimiles of the items are simply stunning. VERDICT Scholarly yet personal, this book treats medievalists, art historians, bibliophiles, and other interested parties to the closest equivalent of a seat in the great archives. A beautiful book about beautiful books.-Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
