Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Product Information

One of the cultural highlights of the autumn…Christopher de Hamel has turned a lifelong obsession with ancient literature into a book that critics are comparing to A History of the World in 100 Objects and the wonderful The Hare with Amber Eyes. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts] is de Hamel’s masterpiece, and has come at the end of a long and distinguished career. And in producing such a gorgeous object, Christopher de Hamel’s publisher has had the courage of his convictions, because its physical and visual delights mirror its commercially unlikely subject matter…[De Hamel] is voraciously completist, recording impressions of each journey, place, building and reading room, as well as every coverage detail of each manuscript’s creation, content and existence as a physical object through time and space… On this archival odyssey, I lost count of the things I learned…[ Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts], like the volumes that are its subject, is a book of wonders. De Hamel’s writing is not academic but vivid and entertaining, while the coloured reproductions are almost as dazzling as the fabulous beasts which so often clamber around their margins.

de Hamel is not so star-struck that he cannot be critical: a famous illustration in the ''Book of Kells'' is ''dreadfully ugly''; a naked Adam and Eve look ''Knobbly-kneed'' and ''brightly pink like newly arrived English holidaymakers on Spanish beaches''. When not awed by the sheer scope of his expertise or absorbed by his concerted efforts to decipher script or dissect scripture, we are diverted by his light flourishes and witty evaluations. billion years old, all those trillions of years in the excerpt occur only in the fertile imagination of the book's author.Very little has changed in religious practice in Ethiopia since about the date of the Gospels of Saint Augustine,” De Hamel notes. Half of the works here were written between the sixth and 11th centuries, when Vikings ruled the waves and men had names like Ecgfrith and Ceolfrith. But anyone with a professional interest in the field will not want to miss de Hamel’s own original thinking about these ancient tomes…a wonderful book.

The Carmina Burana, a 13th-century Bavarian manuscript of 350 mostly bawdy or satirical poems and songs, was written in early gothic minuscule (small letters), yet few of its authors have been identified by name. 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. An Old English version of the Old Testament, for example, mistranslated Moses’s face as gehyrned, or “horned”.

De Hamel, the librarian of Corpus Christi, has spent a lifetime handling, cataloguing and interpreting these gorgeous objects…. Christopher de Hamel’s learned adventures amid some of the West’s greatest manuscript treasures effortlessly outclass Eco’s The Name of the Rose in elegance and excitement.

Parker, likewise, did not see papal purple as a dangerous sign of recusancy, and, indeed, saw a holiness in Augustine. His passion for his work really comes through and this is an insight into a different world - Medieval Europe or Anglo-Saxon England, so unknown to us and yet a lot is relevant to human nature. The idea for the book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into intimate conversations with twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to explore with the author what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. With scholarly elegance, Christopher de Hamel opens the door and invites us to join him for the intellectual expedition of a lifetime. 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. De Hamel’s book, scholarly but unfailingly readable, is the beginning of wisdom in all things scribal and scriptural. With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden “character” of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. 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.

While rats and humidity do much of the damage (“parchment is protein, edible to rodents”), man is by a long chalk the worst offender. A visual feast and a genre-defying mixture of history, memoir, and travelogue held together by the author’s inimitable charm, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is unique slice of publishing and a deeply fascinating read. 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.Instead of guiding our own exploration of these beautiful objects, his book has to serve as a substitute for the real thing. In the course of a long career at Sotheby's Christopher de Hamel probably handled and catalogued more illuminated manuscripts and over a wider range than any person alive. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.