Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
Play sample
  • Published: 17 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241003091
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 624

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 Jan 2018
EBook
17 Oct 2016
Audiobook
26 Oct 2017
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

An extraordinary exploration of the medieval world - the most beguiling history book of the year

This is a book about why medieval manuscripts matter. Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person. 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.

The idea for this book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into an intimate conversation with a selection of the most famous manuscripts in existence, and to let each of those manuscripts illuminate the Middle Ages and sometimes the modern world too. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts invites the reader to accompany the author on exclusive private visits to a dozen very varied collections, in different parts of the world, to discover twelve great manuscripts and to explore their historical and intellectual significance.
  • Published: 17 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241003091
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 624
Categories:

About the author

Christopher de Hamel

In the course of a long career at Sotheby's and at Cambridge University, Christopher de Hamel has probably seen and catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive, and his delight and enthusiasm run through all he writes. 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. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Also by Christopher de Hamel

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club
The Book in the Cathedral
See all

Praise for Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Christopher de Hamel's exploration of medieval manuscripts - a dozen peaks from St Augustine to Chaucer and beyond, gorgeously and copiously illustrated - is itself an extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author's excitement as he conducts us among the great libraries of Western civilization. It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge.

Tom Stoppard

Great manuscripts are the reclusive stars of European cultural history; to be close to one is to enter a secret garden to which few have ever been granted access. With scholarly elegance, Christopher de Hamel opens the door and invites us to join him for the intellectual expedition of a lifetime. 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. They are agents as well as creatures, with histories that embrace and explain our own. This is an endlessly fascinating and enjoyable book.

Neil MacGregor

Truth, as this entrancing book proves, is wonderfully stranger than fiction. 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.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Reading is my life, but only about once a decade do I find a book that seems to tilt the world, so afterwards it appears different.

Fiammetta Rocco, The Economist '1843'