Book Review: Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
Books, literature, history

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is like a celebrity blog for old books. That's the author's simile, not mine, and it's absolutely 100% accurate. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, move along.

Still here? Good. This is Christopher de Hamel's attempt to give book lovers the intellectual/sensory/visceral experience of interacting with these beautiful but inaccessible objects. Most of us can't do this. If you go to Dublin, for example, you should definitely take a look at the Book of Kells . . . but your experience will be limited to looking at a few pages, behind glass, in a dimly-lit room, with throngs of other people elbowing you. Christopher de Hamel has access unavailable to us mortals. He gets to actually sit there with the book in front of him. 

Lucky bastard.

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is both intimate and wide-ranging. Every chapter details one manuscript's history, description, meaning, social context, physical description, location, highlights, and more. Most remarkable, to me, is the fact that in many cases de Hamel plausibly identifies specific individuals--not just patrons, but owners and carriers and artists and scribes--who worked on the volumes. If you don't get a little frisson at thinking about a specific, named person carefully drawing the page you're looking at, sitting there in a dark monastery a thousand years ago . . . I dunno, maybe you should see a shrink or something. These manuscripts are stunningly beautiful, and the book is lavishly illustrated; it's only a shame that it's impossible to reproduce the luster of gold leaf.

The one thing I can imagine some readers finding off-putting is de Hamel's tone. Some might call it witty and wry. Others might find it clubby, insular, and condescending. I didn't object to it, particularly, but then I've been hardened by years of exposure to this sort of thing. Let's just say that Christopher de Hamel is a character in his own book.