Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL

There have been two pivotal moments in the history of the book. The first was the Roman invention of the codex, the familiar bundle of folded pages bound together, which by the fifth century AD had replaced awkward scrolls of papyrus everywhere in the Greco-Roman world. The second was the German invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, which soon replaced hand-written books throughout Europe, and made the book the infinitely reproducible object to which we are accustomed, and which some say is doomed by the internet.

Christopher de Hamel’s marvellous book takes us into the presence – this is exactly what reading his  book feels like – of 12 ­manuscripts, handwritten, hand-decorated books, from the whole 1,000 years between the coming of the codex and the coming of print. The oldest is the Gospels which St Augustine of Canterbury brought to England from Rome when he was dispatched by Gregory the Great to convert the Angles in the late sixth century. The most recent is a very fine Book of Hours made in the Low Countries in the early sixteenth century.

Not all the books are sacred texts. There is a faithful copy, made in Charlemagne’s court, of a classical Latin translation of a third-century BC Greek poem about astronomy, its antique illustrations also copied. There is the manuscript of the mixed collection of songs, poems and little plays, mostly secular, mostly in Latin, called the Carmina Burana because it was discovered in the Abbey of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria (the book is more interesting than Carl Orff would lead one to suppose). There is also the earliest surviving copy of The Canterbury Tales, and a spectacularly illustrated Renaissance handbook on warfare. But the stars of the show are sacred texts.