Patricians of parchment

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. By Christopher de Hamel. Allen Lane; 632 pages; £30.

ON MAY 4th 1945, when Allied troops entered Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps, they discovered devastation—and some very valuable art. Later, American troops would display a selection under an improvised sign reading: “The Hermann Goering Art Collection: Through Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division”. Among the Rembrandts and Renoirs, few paid much attention to two small, dull, squarish objects. A French officer trod on one, thinking it was a brick; another was scooped up by an army doctor.

That initial diagnosis proved incorrect, though. It was not a brick, but a medieval manuscript (the word means “written by hand”.) The second was one of the most famous manuscripts ever made: a prayer book for a medieval queen that had fetched a record-breaking price at Sotheby’s in London in 1919. This was the “Book of Hours” made for a French queen, Jeanne de Navarre. In “Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts” Christopher de Hamel, fellow and librarian of the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, reminds readers why this was such a thrilling discovery.

Mr de Hamel is an unashamed manuscript groupie. The 12 works he writes about are, he explains, superstars of vellum. Like many celebrities, some are tastelessly glitzy, gleaming with gold and studded with jewels. All are closely guarded, spending their days in climate-controlled confinement and travelling in bomb-proof cases. “It is easier,” says Mr de Hamel, “to meet the pope or the president of the United States than it is to touch the ‘Très Riches Heures’ of the Duc de Berry.”

When one New York bookseller was asked to explain in a few sentences who buys such objects, he replied, “I can tell in two words: the rich.” These books, patricians of parchment, have circulated in European society at the very highest level for centuries. Queens inherit them. Saints travel with them. Popes, even now, bow down before them. Jeanne de Navarre’s “Hours”, before Goering got it, was made for the 14th-century French queen and later owned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

To touch a manuscript is to touch another world. And what an otherworldly world this is. Half of the works here were written between the sixth and 11th centuries, when Vikings ruled the waves and men had names like Ecgfrith and Ceolfrith. A little of this mystery still clings to their pages: when Mr de Hamel takes the Gospels of St Augustine (pictured) to a service in Canterbury Cathedral he notices that its leaves are so light they flutter and hum in time to a hymn, “as if the sixth-century manuscript…had come to life”.

Manuscripts are words written down, but they impart far more than sentences. Precise moments in time can be found, like pressed flowers, preserved in their pages. In one ninth-century manuscript a picture of the planets in orbit has been drawn with such precision that astronomers say this configuration happens only once in 17 trillion years. They have dated the manuscript to March 18th 816.

These books may no longer be owned by monarchs, but modern libraries can be as well-defended as medieval kings. Mr de Hamel’s interviews are the closest most readers will come to meeting these books themselves. Like all good interviewers, he leaves the reader with the sense of what it was like to meet each star—their aura, their attire and their size (frequently, as is so often the case with celebrities, smaller than expected). Erudite and enthusiastic, Mr de Hamel is not so star-struck that he cannot be critical: a famous illustration in the “Book of Kells” is “dreadfully ugly”; a naked Adam and Eve look “knobbly-kneed” and “brightly pink like newly arrived English holidaymakers on Spanish beaches”.

He concludes with a call to arms: manuscripts are a neglected corner of academia and he wants more people to study them. Mr de Hamel has catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone in history; everyone, not only academics, should listen to what he has to say. These books are object lessons in impermanence. Only one, the “Hours” of Jeanne de Navarre, remains in the country where it was made. The rest have been dispersed.

In much the same way that oceanographers study the paths of plastic ducks to understand currents, or economists study shipping routes to observe the world economy, one could follow these manuscripts to understand a millennium of European history. Churches are overthrown. Empires fade. Thousand-year Reichs crumble after just a few years. As powers move, so too do manuscripts. Intended to be monuments to their owners’ everlasting potency they serve mainly as their tombstones. A medieval lesson for us all.