The Manuscripts Club Audiobook Libro.fm

A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice

The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge However we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made collected and preserved them through the centuries and to whom they owe their existence

This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years a monk in Normandy a prince of France a Florentine bookseller an English antiquary a rabbi from central Europe a French priest a Keeper at the British Museum a Greek forger a German polymath a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in Americaall of them members of what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club

This exhilarating fraternity and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances Christopher de Hamels unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion that crosses the boundaries of time We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been

In 1850 or thereabouts John Ruskin bought his first manuscript at a booksellers in a back alley This was his reaction The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten goldas many of them werecannot be told The members of de Hamels club share many such wonders which he brings to us with scholarship style and a lifetimes experience