Author Christopher de Hamel talks to us about his latest book The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club and discusses how digitisation has made viewing and studying manuscripts more accessible for the wider world.
Christopher de Hamel is an expert on medieval manuscripts and the author of many books, including The Book in the Cathedral and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize, and his work has been translated into multiple languages.
Christopher is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club is his latest title and is available to borrow from our catalogue.
I was born in London but when I was small, my father took a job in New Zealand, and we settled eventually in Dunedin, towards the bottom of the South Island there. When I was about 12, I found that the Dunedin Public Library had (and still has) a small collection of medieval manuscripts and fragments. I collected stamps as a schoolboy and my oldest stamp (like the earliest European settlement of New Zealand) was nineteenth-century. Suddenly here were genuine items 400 or 500 years earlier still, even a thousand years old, and I was utterly bewitched.
Manuscripts became a teenage hobby. I used to go to the Library after school or on Saturdays to copy them (badly), learning every trick of script and decoration, and the Library staff encouraged me, allowing me to take items out of their cases and sometimes even to borrow them. It is what a good public library should do, and I owe my whole career to them. New Zealand, like America, has important natural history, prehistory, and modern history, but no equivalent of the European Middle Ages, which can be experienced only through things that can be moved, such as manuscripts.
Eventually in the holidays I went to see every medieval manuscript then known to be in the country, and I used to puzzle over questions of dating and localising and reading manuscripts. I wrote a not-very-good little book for the Dunedin Public Library on their Books of Hours in 1970.
I finally completed a degree in history (with Latin) and returned to England for postgraduate work at Oxford, writing a thesis on the production of manuscripts of Glossed Bibles in the twelfth century, although I was by then already long-committed to medieval books. From Oxford, I joined Sotheby's as their full-time cataloguer of medieval manuscripts.
I do not pretend to know everything about manuscripts, although I wish I did. Like any apparent expertise (music, sport, languages, anything), it is mostly simply a matter of relentless practice, rather than anything clever. Although I had been taught some palaeography at university, the real training was seeing and minutely describing thousands of medieval manuscripts for Sotheby's, hundreds for every sale, several times a year.
In every case, we needed to know what the items were, what they said, where they were made and (if possible) by whom, and how they have survived. I cannot think of any other job which could have given me such exposure to so many kinds of undescribed manuscripts. I remained there for 25 years, with another 14 as consultant for my successors when I finally moved on to Cambridge University.
Many of the finest manuscripts in existence are so famous and so widely reproduced that the precious originals are often hard to see. I have spent a huge amount of time in many (even most) of the world's public collections of manuscripts. The concept of the book was to describe where great manuscripts live, how we go about getting access, what each library or museum is actually like (and how they differ) and what it feels like when some supreme manuscript, such as the Book of Kells, is actually placed in front of you.
The book tries to share this experience with the reader. It imagines us turning the pages together, talking together about what we look for and what a lot we can still learn by interviewing an original manuscript face to face.
A passion for any specialised subject brings very different people together across the widest range of backgrounds, age, wealth, or status. The idea of this book is to apply that shared fellowship to all of history. These are the stories of people obsessed or fascinated with illuminated manuscripts across a thousand years. They are very diverse. They include patrons, scribes, booksellers, collectors, editors, librarians (not least), and even forgers and thieves - all brought together in an imagined confraternity of fellow enthusiasts.
There is no secret, but I have no specific project so far other than to live daily among manuscripts.
This is too big a question for me, or at least I have no insights other than what everyone knows or is very obvious. I have been looking at and writing about manuscripts for a long time now, more than 10% of the time since the Middle Ages ended, and of course the availability of knowledge and access to new information has changed and evolved greatly in that time, especially but not only through the internet.
There are many more facsimiles of manuscripts now, and there have been countless important exhibitions bringing manuscripts to the widest public. Even the manuscripts of the Dunedin Public Library are now fully digitised on the internet. There are also scientific techniques for examining manuscripts which were unimaginable when I began, such as non-invasive pigment analysis and extraction of DNA from medieval parchment.
I don't of course know what you watched, but it sounds as though you may be unaware that I wrote a little book on the Becket Psalter, The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket (Allen Lane, 2020); the manuscript was in the British Museum's Becket exhibition in 2021.
One of the finest and most noble manuscripts in Britain is the vast twelfth-century Winchester Bible, doubtless commissioned by the bishop there, Henry of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror. It still belongs to Winchester Cathedral. About half a dozen of its miniatures were cut out, probably between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. One has been found and returned to the manuscript. The others may exist somewhere. More than anything, I would love to find them.
