Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel (review)

Because this book has already had very widespread publicity (helped by the carefully timed revelation—less than two weeks after publication—that the author believes he has identified ‘the Psalter of Thomas Becket’), and numerous reviews, it is perhaps enough by way of introduction to say that it is in twelve chapters, each focussing on a single manuscript, in twelve different libraries, and that the whole is written in a first-person narrative style to engage the reader and vividly convey the experience of visiting the libraries and examining the manuscripts.

There are various criteria by which we might judge this book: it aims to combine entertainment, instruction, and scholarship. It is almost entirely successful as entertainment, if reviews by non-specialists are a reliable guide; it is as if Dan Brown had turned his attention to medieval manuscripts. My comparison with mass-appeal airport thrillers is intentional; several times the author compares the experience of ‘meeting’ a famous manuscript with the experience of meeting a famous person, and tellingly he repeatedly uses the word ‘celebrity’—a word that plays such an important role in contemporary popular culture. The author relates that he made special trips to see all of the manuscripts while writing this book, some of them in glossy-magazine destinations such as Los Angeles, New York, or St Petersburg. There is an unashamed travelogue tone: in Copenhagen, for example, de Hamel takes a break from examining ‘one of the the most beautifully illustrated manuscripts in the world’ to dine on ‘white asparagus with nettle-butter and home-smoked salmon’ in a ‘very fine restaurant along the waterfront’. The reader gets the impression that a manuscript scholar’s life is a gilded existence.

As instruction, the book successfully conveys to the non-specialist some aspects of the experience of visiting libraries, examining manuscripts, and researching the evidence that one finds in them, but the junket tenor, unencumbered by such practicalities as finding the time and funding for research trips, may feel unfamiliar to most people who study old books. Just as the holiday photos one shares with friends are carefully selected, cropped, and perhaps manipulated in other ways to convey a particular impression, so the twelve ‘meetings’ of this book do not convey unfiltered reality, even though the narration implies that they are guileless snapshots. My own willing suspension of disbelief was punctured in most chapters by the inclusion of tired stereotypes: an Italian has ‘perhaps nothing much else to do that day’, in Los Angeles the author meets ‘strikingly pretty girls and clean-cut boys with blue eyes and white teeth’, and so on. No opportunity is missed to entertain and amuse, as when Adam and Eve, depicted in a tenth-century Beatus manuscript, are described as ‘brightly pink like newly arrived English holidaymakers on Spanish beaches’. Infotainment is not a bad thing per se—one could say that much of the work of David Attenborough falls into this category—but it is very unusual to find it applied in this way to the study of medieval manuscripts.

Readers of this journal may want an assessment of the book’s scholarship. In the Introduction we are told that ‘There are new observations and hypotheses in every chapter’, but the absence of footnotes often makes it difficult to distinguish what is second-hand from what is a reinterpretation of already known facts and what is is genuinely original. (To give one example, de Hamel records ‘a sudden shiver of excitement … in realizing’, when examining the Codex Amiatinus, that a correction on the page in front of him in could have been written by the hand of Bede himself: we are led to assume that this is a dramatic new observation, but in the small-font notes at the end of the book we learn otherwise.) But such distinctions do not matter to the non-specialist, and one cannot criticize a book intended for such an audience for not making...