Making Medieval Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel (review)

Christopher de Hamel, FSA, FRHS, Fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, was formerly Fellow Librarian of Cambridge's Parker Library and arguably the Anglophone world expert on medieval manuscripts, having written extensively on manuscript sleuthing. He is author of books such as A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986); Scribes and Illuminators (1992); The Book in the Cathedral (2017), the mystery of Thomas à Becket's jeweled book of psalms for Penguin, which won the Wolfson History Prize and other awards; as well as Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts (2020), also published by Penguin, each book acclaimed for high scholarship. De Hamel also worked for Sotheby's for decades on manuscripts as department head. So any book of de Hamel's on manuscripts is likely as authoritative as possible.

When I find books useful for courses as teaching texts, the reasons may vary; this book on manuscripts offers multiple justifications for inclusion in my upcoming Medieval Art and Archaeology course. An exquisite revision of the above 1992 British Museum Press publication (Scribes and Illuminators) in the Medieval Craftsmen series, this brief book is beyond doubt the most useful such book I've yet found, illustrating every aspect of manuscript production including materials (paper, parchment, vellum, inks, binding, etc.). Its lavish illustrations—nearly every other page is amply and clearly illustrated with high-resolution color images—detail even the most subtle aspect of scribal training and preparation of the entire process from beginning to end (aptly summarized on the conclusion on pages 143–144). While not necessarily aimed at the professional audience—it can be digested in one sitting of a few hours, but will draw one back repeatedly—the book highlights in its production survey dozens of the most beautiful manuscripts in famous collections, the bulk from Oxford's Bodleian Library, but also from the Bibliothèque national de France in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Bologna University Library, and New College Oxford.

Making Medieval Manuscripts is organized in sequence of the steps of production. Chapter 1 is on paper and parchment; chapter 2 covers ink and script; chapter 3 is on illumination and binding; and the back matter contains a brief glossary of technical terms along with a select bibliography and index. Rather than being dryly academic, the book is lively and neither condescending nor riddled with professional jargon, and teaching medievalists can profit from explicative details to be shared with students. Many of de Hamel's insights are worthy of note, as in his opening statement of the introduction: "More manuscripts from the Middle Ages than any other movable artifacts" (9). Given the almost totally organic materials in manuscripts and their challenges of survival, with a millennium and more of fires along with the effects of light (photolysis), heat (thermolysis), water (hydrolysis), temperature (thermolysis), and consuming varmints from bacteria to worms, etc., this survival and continuing conservation are remarkable, essentially meaning manuscripts have been accorded a duly precious status from monasteries and convents to royal and state libraries. Another valuable insight concerns the status of classical authors such as Cicero, Pythagoras, and Ptolemy, whose works may not have otherwise remained were it not for scribal manuscript copyists in scriptoria: "the humanists raided monastic libraries in their search for lost classical texts" (76). Elsewhere, although most scholars likely already know the origins of parchment as pergamentum, so named from the city of "Pergamum whose ancient king Eumenes II is said by Pliny to have invented it in the second century BC during a trade blockade on papyrus" (24), de Hamel's clarity about vellum-veau-vitellus is immediately followed by DNA studies tracking individual "skins" that may differ in an individual manuscript, noting that "local convenience was probably a determining factor: sheep and goat around the Mediterranean, for example, but mostly cattle in Northumbria."

Preparation stages are well illustrated with many examples of incomplete manuscripts at every step of the way. One of the best discussions of manuscript ink (69–72) and pigment source (112–114, 127–129...