Dear Commons Community,
Over the past two months I have been reading about illuminated manuscripts. I previously posted about a new book entitled, The Manuscripts Club (2022), by Christopher de Hamel. See: https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2024/01/13/new-book-christopher-de-hamel-the-manuscripts-club/
I so enjoyed de Hamel’s work that I decided to read his previous book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World (2016), which is every bit as interesting as The Manuscripts Club. In Meetings with Remarkable…, de Hamel reviews the histories of twelve illuminated manuscripts produced during the medieval period. From the gospels of St. Augustine to the Book of Kells to the Canterbury Tales, de Hamel takes the reader on explorations of these incredible works of art. His last chapter on The Spinola Hours was my favorite.
My life’s work has been based on modern technology and research methods. de Hamel’s work could not be more different as he explores art, composition, and the mystery of how these manuscripts came to be. Most of the illuminators and monks who toiled on these manuscripts are unknown and will never be known yet their work will continue to be admired for ages. In sum, de Hamel’s book is a most worthwhile read. Below is a review of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts as published in The New York Times.
Lastly, de Hamel’s work piqued my interest so that I was curious about what it would be like to develop a “modern” illuminated manuscript. While I have written a great deal in my professional career, I have absolutely no talent for drawing or visual art. However, I decided to rely on what I know best and that is digital technology and so I spent the better part of six weeks, developing what I call an illuminated “technuscript.” See: https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2024/02/08/an-illuminated-technuscript-of-theories-and-frameworks-for-online-education/ Essentially, I used design techniques from medieval times and applied them with digital technology and relied on generative AI to produce colorful images to depict the subject matter of the “technuscript.” I found it an exhilarating experience. If you have a few moments, take a look at my work and let me know what you think.
Tony
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The New York Times
Illuminating the Past, One Precious Book at a Time
By Helen Castor
Dec. 19, 2017
MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS
Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World
By Christopher de Hamel
Illustrated. 632 pp. Penguin Press. $45.
“Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts” is one of the least likely and most wonderful books I have ever read. Least likely: Where to start? It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations. And in producing such a gorgeous object, Christopher de Hamel’s publisher has had the courage of his convictions, because its physical and visual delights mirror its commercially unlikely subject matter.
De Hamel — who, after an immensely distinguished career at Sotheby’s, is now a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — wants us to meet 12 of the most extraordinary medieval manuscripts that survive in archives around the world. They appear in chronological order spanning a thousand years, beginning with the sixth-century Gospels of St. Augustine, now in the Parker Library at Corpus, and ending with the National Library of Russia’s 15th-century armaments treatise called the Visconti Semideus, and the 16th-century Spinola Hours, housed in the luxury of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Strange as it may seem, “meet” is exactly what de Hamel means. You and I would not be allowed within touching distance of these rock stars of the manuscript world, but de Hamel’s expertise gives him access behind the velvet rope. We travel with him, seeing libraries and librarians through his eyes, from Trinity College Dublin’s affable keeper of manuscripts (who sports “a neatly cropped graying beard, a bit like a friendly Schnauzer dog with glasses”) to the “saint among manuscript librarians” in St. Petersburg, who feeds him whiskey-flavored Russian chocolates when, work-absorbed, he misses lunch. We hold our breath with him as the priceless volumes are propped on special bookrests or foam pads or cushions (or, in one case, a pile of other books in an unsupervised photocopier room), and we exhale with him as they begin to reveal their secrets.
De Hamel thinks of these encounters as “interviews,” and — as with all the best interviewers — he takes his place as a character in his own narrative. He is voraciously completist, recording impressions of each journey, place, building and reading room, as well as every recoverable detail of each manuscript’s creation, content and existence as a physical object through time and space. Both supremely learned and cheerfully opinionated, he hates the pictures in the eighth-century Book of Kells (“I am not qualified to say whether the four unpleasant-looking angels are lifelike, but they are certainly anatomically very improbable”) but loves its script (“It is calligraphic and as exact as printing, and yet it flows and shapes itself into the space available. It sometimes swells and seems to take breath at the ends of lines”). Forced to wear unnecessary and unhelpful white gloves while examining the 13th-century Carmina Burana, he is left disconsolate when his wife puts them, blackened with the 800-year-old dust he has brought home as a souvenir, straight into the wash.
On this archival odyssey, I lost count of the things I learned. In the Middle Ages, an impossible task was one harder “than it was for a one-legged man to shave a hare” (which accounts for the wooden-legged figure holding a pair of shears over a long-eared beast in a margin of the 12th-century Copenhagen Psalter). Perhaps the most prolific and gleeful thief in the history of manuscripts was the 19th-century Count Guglielmo Bruto Icilio Timoleone Libri-Carrucci dalla Sommaia — known appropriately as “Libri” — for whom de Hamel has an unmistakable soft spot. Paleographers of de Hamel’s caliber can guess where in Europe a manuscript was made simply by the touch and smell of the parchment. And the move from Egyptian papyrus to locally prepared animal skins after the fall of the Roman Empire changed the shape of books from square to rectangular: “most mammals,” after all, “are oblong.”
What of the manuscripts themselves? Some are tiny, jewel-like, exquisite: The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, from the 14th century, was made for the hands and the devotions of a queen, its psalms and prayers framed by illuminations of extraordinary delicacy. Some are mammoth and intimidating: The seventh-century manuscript Bible known as the Codex Amiatinus is made of the skins of 515 calves and weighs as much (an earlier scholar noted) as a fully grown female Great Dane. Some have barely moved from the places where they were written, while others have taken long and troubled paths to the hushed havens in which they now lie: Jeanne de Navarre’s book was found alongside the “Très Belles Heures” of the Duc de Berry — which was mistaken for a brick by the soldier who stepped on it — when the train carrying Hermann Göring’s stolen art collection was raided by French troops in 1945. Most are sacred texts, but some are deliciously secular, like the sometimes bawdy poems and songs of the Carmina Burana or the tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. All are fascinating, all speak of the world in which they were made, and all are tangibly, movingly human, thanks to the skills and quirks of the mostly unknown scribes and illuminators whose remarkable creations they are.
The Copenhagen Psalter contains a collect for peace, asking that we “may pass our time in rest and quietness.” Its words, de Hamel suggests, are as relevant today as they were to the Danish kings Valdemar the Great and Knud IV, “who read them here too, as we do.” In the ambiguous tense of that verb, “read,” past and present for a moment collide and intermingle. This, like the volumes that are its subject, is a book of wonders.
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