The Kindle version, which I hold in my hands, allows magnification, hence progressive discovery of detail. A former librarian of Parker Library at Cambridge and cataloger of illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby’s, de Hamel brings extensive expertise to his meticulous examination of 12 celebrated manuscripts created from the sixth to the 16th century…The book is sumptuously illustrated…A rare, erudite, and delightfully entertaining history. The German composer Carl Orff turned the document’s blocky, black minuscule into a numbingly insistent piece of ersatz medieval folk (used years later in the Old Spice ad), of which the Nazis were very fond.

A little of this mystery clings to their pages: when de Hamel takes the Gospel of St Augustine (pictured in the Economist) 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 . The author of the book is Christopher de Hamel, fellow and librarian of the Parker Library of Corpus Christi, Cambridge. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.Instead of guiding our own exploration of these beautiful objects, his book has to serve as a substitute for the real thing. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels.

An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author’s excitement…It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge. billion years old, all those trillions of years in the excerpt occur only in the fertile imagination of the book's author. The Carmina Burana, a 13th-century Bavarian manuscript of 350 mostly bawdy or satirical poems and songs, was written in early gothic minuscule (small letters), yet few of its authors have been identified by name. Perhaps most important in discussing this magnificent work is to assure you that the overarching erudition is rendered clearly and with great kindness to you, his companion.De Hamel makes an informative, entertaining book (the most suitable medium, after all), and no one but he could have written it. Christopher de Hamel's learned adventures amid some of the West's greatest manuscript treasures effortlessly outclass Eco's The Name of the Rose in elegance and excitement. Sumptuously illustrated, Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is a journey to some of the world’s greatest collections, from Copenhagen to Florence, Munich to St Petersberg. Of the 12 manuscripts investigated by him in his delightful, absorbing book, only one – the medieval Hours of Jeanne de Navarre – is preserved today in the country where it was created.