THE MANUSCRIPTS CLUB

A millennium of production, patronage, scholarship, and rediscovery of medieval manuscripts.

Manuscript devotees get the star treatment in this fascinating and multilayered art history, a natural follow-up to de Hamel’s award-winning previous book, Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts. The "club" includes 12 historical figures featured in short biographical chapters. The author begins with Saint Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. In the 15th century, Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the most successful bookseller in Europe," turned Renaissance Italy’s rediscovery of ancient classics into a business. Simon Bening, active in 16th-century Bruges, is one of the few manuscript illuminators whose name we know. Sir Robert Cotton, an early modern antiquary, owned hundreds of manuscripts, and his classification numbers are still used by the British Library. Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664-1736) acquired Hebrew manuscripts, and Jean-Joseph Rive authored "the most bad-tempered book on manuscripts ever written" in 1789. Other notable club members: Sir Frederic Madden, the first Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum; notorious forger Constantine Simonides; Theodor Mommsen, the only manuscript scholar to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and Belle da Costa Greene, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, "the finest library of illuminated manuscripts outside Europe." This tour through manuscript history is dense with facts and dates but never dry. De Hamel, manuscript consultant for Sotheby's since 1975, is a charming and knowledgeable guide, and his “visits” with his subjects—tours of their residences or libraries—brings their obsessions to vivid life. By the end, readers are likely to agree that "illuminated manuscripts are the most entrancing of artefacts, conveyors both of texts and of some of the most refined art ever painted,” as well as “windows into human aspirations, emotions and sense of beauty.” The text features four-color illustrations throughout.

An impressive immersion in the storied precincts of art connoisseurship.