Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

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He is the author of many books, translated into numerous languages, including A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, The Book in the Cathedral, and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. 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 German composer Carl Orff turned the document’s blocky, black minuscule into a numbingly insistent piece of ersatz medieval folk (used years later in the Old Spice ad), of which the Nazis were very fond. 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. 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.

It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations. It is even doubtful how anti-Roman Parker’s patron Elizabeth I really was; she was known to keep a crucifix, candles and other crypto-catholic ornaments in her bedside cabinet.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Christopher De Hamel has spent a lifetime in the company of rare manuscripts and in this delight of a book he invites us to meet them with him.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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. This was not a book that one simply reads, but a journey during which one pauses to look at the illustrations. An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author’s excitement…It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge.In this, he succeeds brilliantly, producing a truly wonderful book in the process – wise, entertaining and informative.