Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize

"Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is one of the least likely and most wonderful books I have ever read. . . . a book of wonders." --New York Times Book Review

"De Hamel is a man of extraordinary erudition and easy charm; his book asks many questions of the past, and invokes many mysteries." --The New Yorker

"Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is miles away from academic dry-as-dust scholarship. You'll love learning from it." --Washington Post

An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history--and about the modern world, too.

In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell).

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. 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.

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.

Christopher de Hamel is perhaps the best-known writer on medieval manuscripts in the world. In the course of a long career at Sotheby's he catalogued more illuminated manuscripts than any other person alive, and very possibly more than any one individual has ever done. He is the author of many books, translated into numerous languages, including The Manuscripts Club, 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. De Hamel lives in London and Cambridge.