Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Product Information

Jeanne de Navarre's ''Hours'' was made for the 24th-century French queen and later owned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. 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. I also appreciated the author’s observations of libraries and places visited to encounter the protagonists, I. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.

Indeed, Ethiopia converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD, when the Ark of the Covenant – the Old Testament casket lined with gold to accommodate the two tablets bearing the 10 Commandments – was allegedly transferred there from southern Egypt. The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of Middle English literature, was copied down by Chaucer’s scribe Adam Pinkhurst; though the parchment is grievously damaged, it marks the earliest attempt to circulate Chaucer’s tales in 14th-century London. The Kindle version, which I hold in my hands, allows magnification, hence progressive discovery of detail. Fascinatingly, the Mediterranean-coloured pictorial squares of the Parker Library manuscript are said to resemble the primitive-looking narrative cycles of religious scenes found in Ethiopia’s orthodox churches. A remote town in southern Italy, Rossano, is home to a sixth-century Greek manuscript illustrating the life of Christ.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''. 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.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World is a 2017 book by historian Christopher de Hamel that explores the European medieval world through an in-depth study of 12 illuminated manuscripts. A glorious book…de Hamel pulls readers in with his unmistakable passion for every facet of these handcrafted treasures…. Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. 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 author of the book is Christopher de Hamel, fellow and librarian of the Parker Library of Corpus Christi, Cambridge.

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. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is one of the least likely and most wonderful books I have ever read. 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. The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace.