Dear Commons Community,
I have just finished reading Christopher de Hamel’s The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts. de Hamel is a fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and was the librarian of the Parker Library there, which includes a treasure trove of manuscripts in the English language. I have a very limited knowledge of medieval manuscripts, although I have read several books on the subject. de Hamel’s book is a chronology of the lives of twelve important contributors to the development of manuscripts starting with St. Anselm in the 11th century and ending with New York City’s own, Belle Greene, who was the force behind the Morgan Library in Manhattan. By presenting the lives of these individuals chronologically, de Hamel provides a history of the movement. The book includes a plethora of beautiful images of the artwork that went into the development of many of these manuscripts that exemplify the presentation of these books as true masterpieces. I also found de Jamel’s writing style very clear and accessible.
In sum, I found The Manuscripts Club … a most enjoyable read for anyone whether you have an interest in the topic or not.
BRAVO!
Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times Review of Books.
Tony
The New York Times
Review of Books
The Members of This ‘Manuscripts Club’ Were Obsessed With Medieval Books
The bibliophiles in Christopher de Hamel’s lavishly illustrated book ensured the survival of medieval texts over centuries.
Bruce Holsinger teaches at the University of Virginia and serves as editor of New Literary History. His most recent book is “On Parchment: Animals, Archives and the Making of Culture From Herodotus to the Digital Age.”
THE MANUSCRIPTS CLUB: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts, by Christopher de Hamel
A harrowing passage in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” describes the ransacking of Cardinal Wolsey’s house in 1529 by the Dukes of Norfolk and Sussex, a pillage that included recklessly emptying Wolsey’s chests of their medieval books: “The texts are heavy to hold in the arms, and awkward as if they breathed; their pages are made of slunk vellum from stillborn calves, reveined by the illuminator in tints of lapis and leaf-green.”
Though the vellum books are destined “for the king’s libraries,” the marauders treat them roughly, hinting at the irreverent attitude toward medieval manuscripts that characterized much of the early modern period. It seems nothing less than a miracle that so many manuscripts from the era endure to our day. We owe their survival to the ingenuity, labor and passion of those who rescued the books from fires and floods, collected them from the corners of the earth and found ways to preserve them in the face of often daunting obstacles.
These heroes are the subjects of Christopher de Hamel’s lovingly written and lavishly illustrated “The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts.” Crack the spine of any volume by de Hamel and you will step into a world of bookish wonderment. One of the most eminent living scholars and catalogers of medieval European manuscripts, de Hamel is also their greatest champion, having devoted his career to revealing their treasures and mysteries to scholarly and public audiences alike.
Alongside his catalogs of private and public collections, he has published studies and guidebooks on a variety of topics. “Scribes and Illuminators” (1992) is still widely taught to students in paleography and codicology (the sciences of old handwriting and old manuscript books, respectively), while “The Book: A History of the Bible” (2001) surveys the history of the sacred Hebrew and Christian texts through the lens of their myriad surviving manuscripts.
Here, in a sequel of sorts to his “Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts” (2017), de Hamel is focused not on the books themselves (though codices and scrolls come in for much expert discussion), but rather on their makers and collectors and preservers, the people who have been responsible for helping to perpetuate one of the great cultural legacies of the pre-modern world.
As the book’s title might suggest, its tone is deliberately clubby. De Hamel imagines a series of intimate conversations between himself and his historical subjects as he roams across centuries, nations and creeds in his pursuit of the larger narrative of preservation. His book tells this story in 12 chapters, each titled after its subject’s particular relation to the manuscripts he or she collected, worshiped from or sometimes faked: “The Bookseller,” “The Illuminator,” “The Librarian,” “The Editor,” “The Forger” and so on. Based on scrupulous research into written sources in numerous languages, the conversations are both informative and informal, as if (to cite just one instance) de Hamel happened to show up on the grounds of an 11th-century monastery for a bookish chat with the willing abbot.
As de Hamel tells it, the history of the manuscripts club begins with medieval bibliophiles such as St. Anselm (circa 1033-1109), the archbishop of Canterbury following the Norman Conquest, whose letters tell us how much he valued the production and collection of manuscripts; and Jean, Duc de Berry (1340-1416), “the most important royal patron of manuscripts in medieval Europe,” whose commissions include the famously beautiful prayer book the “Très Riches Heures.” Subsequent chapters explore great bookmen of the Renaissance, from the Florentine tradesman Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Flemish illuminator Simon Bening to the English antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton — manuscript obsessives all.
A particular eye-opener is de Hamel’s chapter on David Oppenheim (“The Rabbi”), who, in late-17th-century Worms, began collecting manuscripts from “across the whole diaspora of international Judaism.” Oppenheim maintained an active relationship with the Hebrew printing industry while facing “Christian censorship and antisemitic destruction.” Here, as so often in the book, de Hamel sets aside his posture of well-earned expertise to gaze with the reader in ingenuous wonder at the work arrayed before him: “Because I do not know, I would constantly have been asking Oppenheim the dates of manuscripts.”
The book’s final case study covers the fascinating career of Belle da Costa Greene (“The Curator”), who, following a stint at Princeton University’s library, served as private librarian to J. Pierpont Morgan and his son, J.P. Morgan Jr., and ultimately became the founding director of the famed Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan. Of Black ancestry on both sides, Greene chose to pass for white (as her mother had), allowing her access to a social sphere of “Astors and Vanderbilts and Guggenheims and Rockefellers” as she accumulated and curated one of the finest collections of medieval manuscripts in the world.
De Hamel excavates Greene’s voluminous correspondence while citing generously from the work of previous biographers (among them Heidi Ardizzone and Jean Strouse), who uncovered the contours of Greene’s career as one of the most significant book collectors of the modern era and her transformation into what de Hamel calls a “grande dame of America.”
The varied trajectories of de Hamel’s manuscripts club members underscore, as he suggests, our constantly evolving conception “of beauty and sensitivity to craftsmanship,” as well as “the fascination of transmitting knowledge through the centuries.” At the end of his introduction, de Hamel beckons us through the doors to greet his cast: “Come to dinner. Let us meet them.” It’s an invitation all but the most churlish readers will gratefully accept.
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