Reviews
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys Into the Medieval World by Christopher Hamel
nicktomjoe's review against another edition
5.0
"I hope that these encounters had conveyed some sense of the thrill of the pursuit and the simple pleasure of meeting an original manuscript, and asking it questions and listening to its replies." De Hamel has pitched it exactly. I love this book, wholeheartedly, a scholar writing with insight and passion - and wit and lively description.
bub_9's review against another edition
4.0
This is just delightful and a really fun way of introducing an unbelievably esoteric world of medieval texts to the average reader (with much thanks to the beautiful illustrations). The author does a brilliant job of exploring the intricacies and historical exigencies of each work and its context of production which, one feels, is a process which might someday be performed upon the works we produce and consume in our present moment.
Here are the 12 subjects of the fascinating "meetings" the author has:
1. Gospels of Saint Augustine
2. The Codex Amiatinus
3. The Book of Kells
4. The Leiden Aratea
5. The Morgan Beatus
6. Hugo Pictor
7. The Copenhagen Psalter
8. The Carmina Burana
9. The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre
10. The Hengwrt Chaucer
11. The Visconti Semideus
12. The Spinola Hours
Here are the 12 subjects of the fascinating "meetings" the author has:
1. Gospels of Saint Augustine
2. The Codex Amiatinus
3. The Book of Kells
4. The Leiden Aratea
5. The Morgan Beatus
6. Hugo Pictor
7. The Copenhagen Psalter
8. The Carmina Burana
9. The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre
10. The Hengwrt Chaucer
11. The Visconti Semideus
12. The Spinola Hours
mollye1836's review against another edition
5.0
This book would be a delight even if you only considered the multiple, full-page, high-resolution, splendidly colored images of the manuscripts discussed. And there are so many!!!!! It is really a feast for the eyes.
I know that I enjoyed this book so much partly because I am working in special collections. It feels like sharing a great inside joke with someone you admire (which is how I feel about most of the people in this field, the special collections field).
It’s also very human. I was pleased as punch to find my eye landing on a bright green parrot on a Netherlandish page, only to find on the following page that the author has something to say about it, that that same detail jumped out at him. My eyes were drawn to medieval children playing in the margins and I wonder what became of them.
This field is as much about studying rare books as it is about studying the people who handled and commissioned them. It is a highly emotionally charged history—one of the items discussed was plucked by Göring during the Second World War. There are also just ordinary people who handled them—clergy, civil servants, municipal librarians, noblewomen. These precious objects touch each of us differently and I was so happy to see someone, a leader in this field no less, discuss that secret history—the passage of these objects through time, how they came to be and why they matter now.
Medieval art is often depicted to laypeople as crude, naïve, and primitive. The beautiful pictures with de Hamel’s commentary are so full of life, I found myself smiling and laughing more frequently than you might think for someone reading historical non-fiction.
The only drawback is that sometimes there is too much information to absorb. That isn’t a criticism of de Hamel because more information is always better, in my opinion, but it does make it difficult to retain information (at least for me, I’ve had some memory issues since my seizure). But that just means I will read it again soon!
I know that I enjoyed this book so much partly because I am working in special collections. It feels like sharing a great inside joke with someone you admire (which is how I feel about most of the people in this field, the special collections field).
It’s also very human. I was pleased as punch to find my eye landing on a bright green parrot on a Netherlandish page, only to find on the following page that the author has something to say about it, that that same detail jumped out at him. My eyes were drawn to medieval children playing in the margins and I wonder what became of them.
This field is as much about studying rare books as it is about studying the people who handled and commissioned them. It is a highly emotionally charged history—one of the items discussed was plucked by Göring during the Second World War. There are also just ordinary people who handled them—clergy, civil servants, municipal librarians, noblewomen. These precious objects touch each of us differently and I was so happy to see someone, a leader in this field no less, discuss that secret history—the passage of these objects through time, how they came to be and why they matter now.
Medieval art is often depicted to laypeople as crude, naïve, and primitive. The beautiful pictures with de Hamel’s commentary are so full of life, I found myself smiling and laughing more frequently than you might think for someone reading historical non-fiction.
The only drawback is that sometimes there is too much information to absorb. That isn’t a criticism of de Hamel because more information is always better, in my opinion, but it does make it difficult to retain information (at least for me, I’ve had some memory issues since my seizure). But that just means I will read it again soon!
siria's review against another edition
5.0
A handsomely produced brick of a book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is an engaging introduction to twelve significant illuminated manuscripts produced in medieval Europe. Given the number of illuminated manuscripts that survive, there's no way that any such selection could claim to be definitive or truly represenative, and Christopher de Hamel makes no claim to that. These are merely twelve manuscripts—books of hours, psalters, an anthology of song lyrics, a Chaucer manuscript—that have artistic merit and historical significance and that appeal to de Hamel. He is an amiable and knowledgeable guide, who knows how to make collations and bindings interesting to a lay audience—I think, at least. (He's certainly a better hand at it than I am any time I try to do the same, though admittedly the manuscripts I work on are not the pretty, illuminated sort. I would never have thought to compare the weight of a manuscript to that of an average Great Dane!)
There are times when his rather Anglocentric viewpoint and privileged (privately educated, his past employers are Sotheby's and Cambridge University) background do interfere somewhat with the text. De Hamel declares the art of the Book of Kells "weird" and "grotesque" (rarely do my nationalist hackles raise except when in the presence of a patronising Englishman), and in the epilogue urges book readers to become students of medieval manuscripts themselves, to visit libraries and look at digital copies online. I think he may perhaps have forgotten that skills medievalists think commonplace (a knowledge of Latin and medieval vernaculars, palaeography, codicology, etc) are in fact rather rarefied.
Those quibbles aside, there's no denying that this is an absorbing read—and a testament to the enduring power of books.
There are times when his rather Anglocentric viewpoint and privileged (privately educated, his past employers are Sotheby's and Cambridge University) background do interfere somewhat with the text. De Hamel declares the art of the Book of Kells "weird" and "grotesque" (rarely do my nationalist hackles raise except when in the presence of a patronising Englishman), and in the epilogue urges book readers to become students of medieval manuscripts themselves, to visit libraries and look at digital copies online. I think he may perhaps have forgotten that skills medievalists think commonplace (a knowledge of Latin and medieval vernaculars, palaeography, codicology, etc) are in fact rather rarefied.
Those quibbles aside, there's no denying that this is an absorbing read—and a testament to the enduring power of books.
marginaliant's review against another edition
5.0
When I read books about medieval manuscripts, I come to them fully prepared for a slog. For some reason, it's a field full of dry and tedious prose. When my father recommended this book to me I picked it up with some trepidation. It is, in fact, a thick brick of a book at around 600 pages.
Now that I've come to the end of it, I can confidently say that Christopher de Hamel is now responsible for one of the best reading experiences I have had in books reading to medieval manuscripts, as well as books relating to the middle ages, material culture, art history, and history more generally. It is simply that good.
The book is divided into chapters that are each devoted to a different manuscript. These manuscripts range in age and subject matter so as to really give us a broad scope of the field of medieval manuscripts as a whole. While some of the greatest hits of medieval manuscripts are conspicuously absent (the Duc de Berry's famous book of hours being among them) the book isn't the poorer for these absences. After all, any book can talk about that book of hours.
De Hamel's insider perspective would be enough to bring the reader in close contact with some of the most remarkable medieval manuscripts, but his personality and writing are what kept me around for the whole book. He invites us along with him in a conversational (and sometimes conspiratorial, as when he tells us about eating chocolate liqueurs and not using gloves while handling manuscripts) manner. It's clear that he loves these books and he wants us to love them as well.
If I had a large private library of medieval books, there is no one I would rather have come and assess them.
Now that I've come to the end of it, I can confidently say that Christopher de Hamel is now responsible for one of the best reading experiences I have had in books reading to medieval manuscripts, as well as books relating to the middle ages, material culture, art history, and history more generally. It is simply that good.
The book is divided into chapters that are each devoted to a different manuscript. These manuscripts range in age and subject matter so as to really give us a broad scope of the field of medieval manuscripts as a whole. While some of the greatest hits of medieval manuscripts are conspicuously absent (the Duc de Berry's famous book of hours being among them) the book isn't the poorer for these absences. After all, any book can talk about that book of hours.
De Hamel's insider perspective would be enough to bring the reader in close contact with some of the most remarkable medieval manuscripts, but his personality and writing are what kept me around for the whole book. He invites us along with him in a conversational (and sometimes conspiratorial, as when he tells us about eating chocolate liqueurs and not using gloves while handling manuscripts) manner. It's clear that he loves these books and he wants us to love them as well.
If I had a large private library of medieval books, there is no one I would rather have come and assess them.