The physical glory of books
Rediscover the delight in the pleasure of book making and reading
“Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts” will reawaken your love of books in their physical glory, binding, paper, stitching, illustrations, endpapers, the whole caboodle. Christopher De Hamel is a paleographer, i.e. part historian of ancient manuscripts, part detective of the identity of their scribes. He had a long career cataloguing illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby’s before becoming librarian of the Parker Library at Cambridge University.
This book caught my eye when it received rave reviews in the U.K. in 2016, so I was pleased to see it released in North America last October. At $60 and 632 pages in hardcover, you might be tempted by the ebook version. But you would be cheating yourself of the tactile experience between these covers.
What’s inside is a tour of 12 illuminated manuscripts from the late sixth century to the mid 16th century. Some, like the Book of Kells and the Canterbury Tales, are well-known, some are thousand-year-old gems hidden in libraries far from where they were made. De Hamel is our guide, describing his excursion to each library, and his excitement donning the cotton gloves (a rule he reluctantly obeys) and opening the clasps on the binding to turn the first page.
We are swept along to the monastic scriptorium where a monk sharpens his quill pen, draws evenly spaced lines on the parchment and begins to copy verses from the Latin Vulgate Bible. His fellow monk will mix colours made from plants and chemicals to decorate the page with borders and illustrations, some of them with gold leaf.
Manuscript making predates Gutenberg and the mass production of books that mechanical type allowed. The written word began on scrolls, first on papyrus, then on parchment. Books, first called codices, are rectangular because that is the shape of the sheep or goat skins that parchment is peeled from.
The Gospel of Saint Augustine, the first manuscript described, dates from the fourth century when ancient Rome was collapsing and missionaries arrived in England. The roots of western literacy are inseparable from the founding of new monasteries and the necessity of a written Gospel (and later the liturgy of the hours, the seven times a day that monks worshipped), to anchor their evangelizing. Literacy moved beyond the monastic walls as royal families in Europe commissioned Books of Hours for their personal devotions. Besides the psalms, prayers and other readings, they had alphabets to teach young princes and princesses, who learned to write the Paternoster (Lord’s Prayer) as their first exercise. The royal patrons, their offspring, and heraldic crests appear in the illustrations, helping the paleographer date the manuscript.
Of a more secular mode was the Leiden Aratea from the eighth century, like a modern astrology manual with each of the zodiac constellations shown with their animal signs. It includes a planetarium drawn with the zodiac signs forming the outer ring, and the sun, moon and four planets orbiting earth. This makes near-exact dating of the manuscript possible: that configuration occurred on Tuesday, 18 March, 816, an “Meetings alignment possible only once in 17,000,000,000,000 years!
The other more secular manuscript is the Carmina Burana, a 13th-century collection of Latin and German drinking and love songs, a few of which Carl Orff set to music in the 20th-century.
“Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts” is an antidote to today’s declining attention span induced by our cellphone addiction. Savour it slowly as much for its tour of early writing and medieval artwork as its delight in the pleasure of book making and reading ... the whole caboodle.