Christopher de Hamel's learned adventures amid some of the West's greatest manuscript treasures effortlessly outclass Eco's The Name of the Rose in elegance and excitement. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. His passion for his work really comes through and this is an insight into a different world - Medieval Europe or Anglo-Saxon England, so unknown to us and yet a lot is relevant to human nature.

In a marvellous chapter, De Hamel communicates his excitement at holding the famous Chaucer manuscript at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. While rats and humidity do much of the damage (“parchment is protein, edible to rodents”), man is by a long chalk the worst offender.A little of this mystery clings to their pages: when de Hamel takes the Gospel of St Augustine (pictured in the Economist) to a service in Canterbury Cathedral he notices that its leaves are so light they flutter and hum in time to a hymn, as if the sixth-century manuscript . Christopher de Hamel’s learned adventures amid some of the West’s greatest manuscript treasures effortlessly outclass Eco’s The Name of the Rose in elegance and excitement. This was not a book that one simply reads, but a journey during which one pauses to look at the illustrations. 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. An Old English version of the Old Testament, for example, mistranslated Moses’s face as gehyrned, or “horned”.

and] details each document’s idiosyncrasies while contextualizing its time and place of creation…De Hamel’s delightful book is bound to inspire a new set of medievalists.

Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is like meeting a very famous person. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. De Hamel’s writing is not academic but vivid and entertaining, while the coloured reproductions are almost as dazzling as the fabulous beasts which so often clamber around their margins.

Jeanne de Navarre's ''Hours'' was made for the 24th-century French queen and later owned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Erudite and enthusiastic…de Hamel has catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone in history; everyone, not only academics should listen to what he has said. A visual feast and a genre-defying mixture of history, memoir, and travelogue held together by the author’s inimitable charm, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is unique slice of publishing and a deeply fascinating read. An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author’s excitement…It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge.Of the 12 manuscripts investigated by him in his delightful, absorbing book, only one – the medieval Hours of Jeanne de Navarre – is preserved today in the country where it was created. Perhaps most important in discussing this magnificent work is to assure you that the overarching erudition is rendered clearly and with great kindness to you, his companion. 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. The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of Middle English literature, was copied down by Chaucer’s scribe Adam Pinkhurst; though the parchment is grievously damaged, it marks the earliest attempt to circulate Chaucer’s tales in 14th-century London.

These books, patricians of parchment, have circulated in European society at the very highest level for centuries. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Illuminated Anglo-Saxon translations of the Bible (of which Northumbria’s Lindisfarne Gospels is the oldest to have survived) at times encouraged antisemitism. Very little has changed in religious practice in Ethiopia since about the date of the Gospels of Saint Augustine,” De Hamel notes. De Hamel makes an informative, entertaining book (the most suitable medium, after all), and no one but he could have written it.Christopher De Hamel has spent a lifetime in the company of rare manuscripts and in this delight of a book he invites us to meet them with him. When not awed by the sheer scope of his expertise or absorbed by his concerted efforts to decipher script or dissect scripture, we are diverted by his light flourishes and witty evaluations.