Although I did manage to get some reading done during the move from the old house to our new one, and although I know where most of my books currently are (and so have no real excuse for woolgathering), I’m exercising my benevolent dictatorship powers tonight to share a particular passion and, if you’re a fantasy reader I’ll bet you’ll enjoy it, too. You might be a manuscript aficionado or you just might be manuscript-curious, but since so much of fantasy is grounded in medieval-style settings and so many medievalists came to their vocation via fantasy (let’s see a show of hands — yep, knew it!) tonight I thought it meet to extol the work of Christopher de Hamel, one of the most knowledgeable experts in medieval European manuscripts in the world and a terrific scholar to boot, as well as a fluent, entertaining and engaging writer. I got a pair of de Hamel’s recent books over the holiday and am deeply enjoying them, so tonight I’ll subject you to a laity-level sermon about the pleasures of manuscripts and the benefits of reading de Hamel.
De Hamel is of the rare breed of scholars who are easy to read, and a long career in manuscript scholarship has left him only more enthused about his subject. After spending most of his career in the medieval manuscript department at Sotheby’s, he became curator of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Which is itself a funny story he relates in Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, as the Parker Library was the only library to have ever refused him access before he became its curator. An expert codicologist (a specialist in the history and construction of books, from the Latin codex, meaning book)1 de Hamel writes for non-experts with a passion and approachability that’s unique in scholarship.
I want to know everything about them [manuscripts]. I want to know who made them and when and why and where, and what they contain and where their texts came from, why a particular manuscript was thought to be needed, and how they were copied and under what conditions, and how these affected the format and size, what materials were used, how long the manuscripts took to make, why and how they were decorated and by whom (if they were decorated, and why not if they weren’t), and what they cost, how they were bound, who used them and in what way, how or whether they were retransmitted onwards into further copies, what changes were made to them later, where they were kept, how they were shelved and catalogued, how they have survived often against all odds, who has owned them, how they were bought and sold and for how much (for they were always valuable), under what circumstances they reached the custody of their current owners — and, at every one of these questions, how we can tell. We can enjoy ourselves poking impertinently into the affairs of men and women of long ago, and sharing the same original artefacts which gave delight to those people too.
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, p. 8
This is the best summation of why someone studies manuscripts I’ve ever read. Nothing can match the particular thrill of opening a medieval codex, of turning the pages and counting the collation, examining the hands, deciphering the marginal notations, reading the text — usually written in oak gall ink, which starts out black but ages to a lovely warm brown — looking at the rulings and prickings and the mise-en-page (everything on a page is pre-planned and has to be allocated for: columns for text; capitals; miniature paintings and illumination; glosses, which are formal comments and explanations that are often written between the lines of a text or blocked off to the sides, as well as reader comments stuck in the margins, as medieval readers were a chatty lot). It’s unlike any other discipline. These artefacts are separated from us by centuries and cultures and often by language and the tics and abbreviations and sigils of scribes, and yet, they’re also profoundly immediate. Interacting with them is intimate and humbling.
This level of glossing, in which you have only 9 lines of main text and the rest is commentary in 3 levels as well as decorated capitals, doesn’t happen by chance. It requires careful planning. If you want to read more about this aspect of manuscript making and don’t want to wait for de Hamel’s books, you could do worse than to start here at the University of Notre Dame.
De Hamel has written two small books on medieval scribal craft, Scribes and Illuminators, published by the British Museum in 1992, and Making Medieval Manuscripts, published by the Bodleian Library in 2017. Both introduce modern general readers to manuscripts, starting with parchment- and paper-making as well as the making of ink and paints and illumination. Either and/or both are a great introduction to learning your way around manuscript production. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, published by Godine Press in 1986, groups manuscripts by who owned them and the purposes for which they were made: for missionaries, as teaching tools; for rulers, as expressions of power; monks and students and priests, for study; the aristocracy and collectors, as evidence of wealth.
Then there’s de Hamel’s more recent works. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts was published in 2017 and is a delight. De Hamel describes the endeavor as “interviews” with twelve famous manuscripts, roughly one from each century of the medieval period, starting with the sixth-century Gospels of Saint Augustine (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 286) and going through Bibles and Psalters, literature and scientific treatises, all the way to the Spinola Hours (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX.18) a Book of Hours from around 1515. Along the way, you learn all about the way historic libraries are arranged and what it means that the Getty, for instance, acquired a manuscript but it’s still called Ludwig IX.18. (In brief, it’s the same reason that the Beowulf manuscript is London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv: it was located on the top shelf [A], 15th book from the left, on the book case with Emperor Vitellius’ bust in Robert Cotton’s original library. Makes complete sense, right?)
Remarkable Manuscripts is part history, part detective story, part travelogue, and always newsy. It’s also the book in which de Hamel’s wry voice most clearly shines through. At the Getty, for example, after running into trouble because of his lack of an American drivers’ license, he writes
If American security personnel treat you as a probable criminal, all others in Los Angeles regard you as their best friend and address you by your first name. As if it were their greatest joy to assist me, the [interns and docents at the Getty] led me back out again down towards the little station, where I should have turned left down the ramp towards ‘Central Security’ (and by which time I had heard half their life stories and Hollywood ambitions).
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, p. 511
In another author’s voice, this might be a grumpy passage, but de Hamel makes it clear that he’s 1) glad to be on this adventure and 2) charmed by his American escorts.
It’s a very personal book, almost a memoir, and stuffed with cogent observations. In discussing how the Vatican commandeered the Codex Amiatinus for three years from 1587-1590 and returned it renumbered, he observes:
It is a sad truth that if you lend any precious possession reluctantly it seldom comes back in precisely the condition in which it left.
Ibid., p. 732
All through the book he relates the details of where the manuscripts live, how they got there, their conditions, the histories of their conservation — in short, their life stories and their importance, what it is that sets them apart from the thousands of manuscripts now housed around the world. There’s a powerful sense of immediacy in the narrative. Except, as for instance in the case of the Book of Kells, where’s he’s fuzzy on some details because his hosts have asked him to observe some prudent secrecy for security of the manuscript treasures.
Because all these books are priceless. There is no way to appraise their value, as works of art, as cultural icons, as repositories of national identity, as foundational texts. He relates the history of each of twelve manuscripts, all of which are accidents of survival, whether they were buried in archives and all-but-forgotten, or were treasures looted by Vikings or Nazis. If, for instance, you were to wonder about the relationship between the Très Riche Heures du Duc de Berry (reprinted in various editions over the years) and the Hours of Jeanne de Nevarre and what both of them had to do with Hermann Göring (as one does), or why the Codex Amiatinus is so important, and why it was out of England for 1300 years before being loaned to the British Museum in 2018 and making its first trip back to the island in all that time, de Hamel is your guy.
Most recently, de Hamel established that the Saint Augustine Gospel (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286), one of the oldest Gospels in the world, sent by Pope Gregory the Great with Augustine on his mission to convert the Old English in the person of King Ethelbert of Kent, was also a treasured possession of Thomas Becket, and might have been with him the night of December 29, 1170, when he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four drunk knights acting on orders from Henry II. De Hamel establishes the chain of custody and provenance of the manuscript with the precision of a prosecutor, as he recounts in a lecture to the Society of Antiquitaries of London in 2017, and then turned into a recently-published book, The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket.
You need not be a manuscript scholar to enjoy any of de Hamel’s work; all that’s required is curiosity and an interest in history and art. If Tolkien was the gateway drug for medievalists, de Hamel provides a similar enticement for medieval codicologists. And if you read any of his books, you’ll understand what I just wrote.
Fairy stories and metaphors will wait for a while. I’m chasing manuscripts around the world, and having a great time. I hope you’ll consider joining me.
Finally, I want to announce that our own friend and Tolkien scholar Jeffersonian Democrat has had his dissertation awarded the magna cum laude. He’s set to defend soon and, having had the honor of reading the dissertation, I can attest to its brilliance. I hope he’ll stop in and collect some bravos, because his work is amazing. I also hope that, once he catches up on sleep, he’ll consider writing some of his observations about Tolkien’s legendarium for us to absorb and discuss. I’m so impressed, and know that the book he’ll write from it will be both important and brilliant.
Happy New Year, all!
1The primary definition of codex, according to Cassell’s, is “tree.” Secondary meaning is “blockhead,” or “woodenhead” to refer to someone stupid. The third definition is “book,” deriving from wood in that the first Roman “books” were thin sheets of wood covered with wax upon which text was written and bound together, as survive in the Vindolandia tablets. When binding sheets of parchment between wooden covers became the successor to fragile scrolls, each was called a codex, referring to the protective and durable wooden covers. In time the word became synonymous with the whole book — binding and physical contents — and volumes were then called codices. This has been your etymological Bicentennial minute.
2 I’ve been waiting for years to pull an old school Ibid. This seems as good a place as any.
