The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket
CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL
(ALLEN LANE, 64 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Rats and humidity do their best to damage priceless medieval manuscripts, but man is the worst offender. Down the ages, dealers and collectors have ruined calligraphic masterworks through erasures, scrapings and heedless trimmings. Manuscript vandalism can nevertheless tell us something about the religious disputes, patrons and politics of the time.
During the Reformation, under Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I, painted verses and pictures of the life of Thomas Becket (inset), Archbishop of Canterbury, were defaced or destroyed. The cult that flourished round Becket after his murder in the cathedral on 29 December 1170, and subsequent canonisation, was deemed papistical by the reformers. Becket’s relics – bones, clothes, a soiled kerchief – were burned in the drive to uproot a Catholic faith in martyrs.
