HIDDEN HANDS
THE LIVES OF MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR MAKERS
MARY WELLESLEY
riverrun, 370pp, £25
‘This rather short book is packed with wonderful stories beautifully told,’ Gerard Degroot wrote in the Times. ‘Her love of medieval manuscripts shines through her elegant and charming book,’ Linda Porter commented in the Literary Review.
‘Manuscripts do more than convey information. Their creation calls for imagination, physical effort, a love of meaning and beauty. They are works of art in their own right,’ Jonathan Sumption enthused in the
Spectator. ‘Mary Wellesley is a serious scholar, with years of experience of handling these fragile artefacts. Her achievement in this book is to convey something of these sensations…. Few people have described the experience so eloquently.’
She ‘attempts to dispel the widely held belief that all medieval scribes were monks, and to illuminate the women who participated in medieval English literary culture’, Sara Fredman noted in the TLS. Radiocarbon analysis of teeth belonging to a 1,000-year-old female skeleton revealed tiny deposits of lapis lazuli pigment acquired when she occasionally sucked her paintbrush – proof that women worked as manuscript artists and were trusted with the most expensive materials.
‘The range is remarkable,’ Sumption marvelled, in a book encompassing the most important manuscripts, such as the early 8th-century St Cuthbert Gospel, to the more obscure Gwerful Mechain, a gloriously bawdy 15th-century Welsh female poet. Boyd Tonkin in
theartsdesk noted that ‘Wellesley also tries to recover the names and the stories of long-departed book creators’, women like the nun Leoba, ‘the first named English female poet’.
‘Wellesley tracks the after lives of her chosen texts,’ Tonkin noted. ‘She demonstrates how “the whims of scribes, the biases of collectors and the vagaries of chance” determined which works lived, and which died.’ The 15th-century The Book of
Margery Kempe was only discovered when the owners of a country house were looking for a ping pong ball in a cupboard and stumbled on the manuscript instead.
‘A book so sublimely conceived and beautifully written deserves better presentation,’ Degroot quibbled, bemoaning the paucity and positioning of the illustrations, but overall found it ‘an expression of love – deeply intimate and delightfully self-indulgent…’