Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World Hardcover – October 24, 2017 by Christopher de Hamel (Penguin Press)(IBRTravelBooks)

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

Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize.

A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick!

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).


The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, second quarter of the fourteenth century. 


The Long Room in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, built in the early eighteenth century and expanded in the nineteenth. 




The Morgan Beatus, mid-tenth century. For many years this was bound as the opening page, resulting in heavy damage.



The Visconti Semideus, c. 1438.




The Spinola Hours, c. 1515-20.

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.

This book is a wonderful exhibition of artistry, an engaging string of mystery stories, a tour of a period of European history, and a reference volume for readers even casually interested in medieval manuscripts. The author introduces a series of manuscripts in much the way a journalist would interview a series of important (or notorious) public figures--setting the physical and political scene of the interview, and then interweaving physical description of the manuscript with little adventures into history and often with an enticing mystery about the book. He manages to touch on topics from classical Greek authors to movable-type printing, from Charlemagne's court to monastery scriptoria to the rise of the commercial book trade, without ever losing his enthusiasm, focus or narrative thread. He does take time at the beginning to introduce some technical vocabulary and nomenclature, but it is done clearly and in the service of his later story-telling. If you enjoy looking at old manuscripts, love calligraphy or illustration, and aren't already a palaeographer, or if you are just looking for a really engaging romp through medieval European history, this book is a wonderful adventure.