The Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel

B4529. The Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel. Hardcover; 616 pages; 6.5" x 9.5".

Read about the fascinating world of medieval manuscripts with Christopher de Hamel. This captivating book introduces the extraordinary keepers and companions of illuminated manuscripts over the past thousand years.

The Middle Ages produced some of the greatest works of European art and literature, and these manuscripts played a crucial role in preserving knowledge. However, their survival and legacy are owed to the countless men and women who made, collected, and preserved them.

Christopher de Hamel brings to life the stories of remarkable individuals who dedicated their lives to these manuscripts. Meet a monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a central European rabbi, a French priest, a British Museum keeper, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur, and the creator of America's most spectacular library.

Through these stories, de Hamel reveals the passion and dedication that ensured the manuscripts' survival. His insights and discoveries shed new light on how these treasures have been used and cherished across different eras and cultures.

Christopher de Hamel, author of the award-winning Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, may have catalogued more illuminated manuscripts than any other person alive. As a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former librarian of the Parker Library, his expertise and passion for manuscripts shine through in this remarkable book.

"Manuscripts survive, if they do, because of the men and women who preserved and valued them. With rare exceptions, they are not archaeological items, excavated from the ground directly into the museums of our world. They have come down through human history in libraries and personal collections; they may have been bought and sold, neglected or treasured, used, copied, taken apart and not always reassembled, rediscovered, loved, read, ignored, identified, and very often in the end they have been gathered up through different routes into the public collections where most of us now know them." –-Christopher de Hamel, Introduction.