MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS

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 illuminated—i.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 says—and 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.