Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

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With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden ‘character’ of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. 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. Instead of guiding our own exploration of these beautiful objects, his book has to serve as a substitute for the real thing. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is an extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts.

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''. A former librarian of Parker Library at Cambridge and cataloger of illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby’s, de Hamel brings extensive expertise to his meticulous examination of 12 celebrated manuscripts created from the sixth to the 16th century…The book is sumptuously illustrated…A rare, erudite, and delightfully entertaining history. The language is unfussy and untechnical, and really Hamel should do a podcast or audiobook of this because I think it would be fantastic (although viewing the photos of manuscripts is necessary I think). But he tells you in a way that he expects you not to know anything (in a non-patronising way) and explains well little secrets of the Manuscripts.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. 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. Parker, likewise, did not see papal purple as a dangerous sign of recusancy, and, indeed, saw a holiness in Augustine.

Erudite and enthusiastic…de Hamel has catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone in history; everyone, not only academics should listen to what he has said.Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. and] details each document’s idiosyncrasies while contextualizing its time and place of creation…De Hamel’s delightful book is bound to inspire a new set of medievalists. Little wonder that in Britain this extraordinary book has already won both the Wolfson History Prize and the Duff Cooper nonfiction prize. 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. The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. Christopher de Hamel is the author of A History of Illuminated Manuscripts and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts , which won the Wolfson History Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize in 2016. 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.He reveals a stupendous discovery has made about this book that no one had noticed in its centuries on this earth. With a few deft strokes, De Hamel conjures an atmosphere of awe and reverence in the Matthew Parker library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, of which he is custodian and a fellow librarian. 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.