The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club — knowledge and power

Manuscript books are one of the most engaging treasures to survive from the Middle Ages. They bear the marks of the people who made them: the scribes, bookbinders, parchment makers and, most famously, the illuminators and other individuals who decorated the pages of these very personal objects.

What is most surprising about them is that they are not especially rare. Hundreds of thousands of medieval books survive, which means there are many millions of pages that show not only the work — the texts and images — of the mind but the traces of those individuals that made them. Go into most research libraries or into many antiquarian bookshops and you will see one or more on display or for sale. They don’t seem to go out of fashion.

A small subset are truly spectacular pieces that excite the imagination and wonder, and leave a sense of an art and craft that have been lost. These illuminated manuscripts have been the specialism of Christopher de Hamel, for decades the medieval manuscript expert at Sotheby’s and then Fellow Librarian at Corpus Christi College Cambridge. In 2016 he published a surprising best-seller, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, in which he investigated 12 manuscript books, weaving a series of highly engaging stories to take the general reader deep inside a world normally reserved for wealthy collectors, erudite scholars and lucky librarians.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club follows a similar format, this time focusing not on the books but on a dozen individuals who had some intimate connection with these extraordinary works. Among the 12, only a single woman, Belle da Costa Greene, makes the cut. She was a very remarkable individual who developed JPMorgan’s personal library, but surely a bibliophilic sister or two could have joined the throng?

There are similarities between the two books, not least in the same bricklike dimensions: just over 600 pages copiously illustrated in colour. One quibble is that the relatively diminutive format of the book renders the images frustratingly small, often hiding the power of the originals, and making the very qualities that made them so enticing to the individuals who are de Hamel’s subjects, less obvious.

The writing, however, is as gloriously engaging and readable as the earlier work. De Hamel wears his erudition lightly, and the reader is once again taken deeply into the worlds of individuals who lived across almost a thousand years of history from St Anselm in the 11th century to Greene in the 20th. Particular highlights include the court of the famous French patron and collector Jean, Duc de Berry to that of David Oppenheim, Rabbi of Prague who accumulated a vast library of manuscripts and printed books that shows us the world of Jewish intellectual and religious life of Mitteleuropa in the late 17th century.

It reminds me of one of those fantasy dinner parties. An eclectic but highly interesting assemblage of people

Each of the people have been chosen for a different relationship to manuscripts. Sometimes these are fairly loose descriptors. St Anselm, the great theologian and philosopher, is here as “monk”, but really his role is one of author. Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is here as “collector” but could equally be described as a curator, dealer or indeed a connoisseur.

But these are minor gripes as one of de Hamel’s talents is to make the lives and passions of rather obscure figures intelligible to a general reader. These include Sir Robert Cotton, a man whose collection was closely associated with the formation of the institution that became the British Library, but whose life was entwined with national historical events, especially with the tumultuous period of the civil wars of the 17th century with all its political and religious wranglings and regicide. It is a useful reminder of the interplay between knowledge and power.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club reminds me of one of those fantasy dinner parties. An eclectic but highly interesting and enjoyable assemblage of people, personally curated, and all the better for the individual touch. The reader is able to sample 12 different worlds where manuscripts mattered deeply. As we type our endless emails and “likes”, we can only swoon at these astonishing books, and the remarkable people who cared so much about them.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club by Christopher de Hamel, Allen Lane £40, 624 pages

Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian and author of ‘Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack’ (John Murray)

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