rave: Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts 5/5

[jesse_the_k]

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts: 12 journeys into the Medieval—Christopher de Hamel

Print, ebook and audio

I adored this book: it’s one worth owning. De Hamel, a highly qualified paleographer, tours medieval Europe through 12 manuscripts created there. It’s written in a chatty style that would fit in a paleography’s blog if that weren’t oxymoronic. He assumes no specialist knowledge while demonstrating the intense research and logic involved in identifying a manuscript’s origins, creation, and journey around the globe. He is evidently delighted to have the chance to do this, and the book finishes with a recruiting pitch for more medievalists.

You might live near a medieval manuscript!

https://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/app/

will show you where.

De Hamel’s perspective is profoundly Eurocentric; when he meets a manuscript in the US or Russia, his arch disdain for these outlandish custodians explodes from the page. Because these manuscripts’ original context was intensely domestic, more women than I’d expected appear in the history.

Before he turns a page, De Hamel explains the history of each book from its creation to its eventually landing in the lovingly-described rare-books room. This is often quite an adventure story. Perhaps the most remarkable is the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre. It shuttled among the rulers of France for 400 years, was sold and resold many times for 200 years, was personally requisitioned by Herman Goering and then serendipitously discovered among the looted art at Berchtesgaden, and finally multiply repatriated by Rothschilds to la bella france.

I was startled to see that an audiobook edition is available, but de Hamel does an outstanding job of describing each visual element–a skill that’s crucial to a field that flourished long before photography.

The book is illustrated with scores of detailed color photos of each work. As a calligrapher who has struggled with rustic capital, uncial and half-uncial, I was riveted to observe the development of these hands. I was also struck by how imperfect these pages are (with the single exception of the Book of Kells). Even the most skilled medieval scribes were humans, and it was a helpful reminder that perfection is not always the goal.

As de Hamel points out, the culture of the European middle ages didn’t care about originality

Let us look at the whole question of copying. Every medieval manuscript, unless it was the author’s first autograph draft of the text, was necessarily a copy of something else. Scribes reproduced manuscripts which already existed, and they learned to copy as carefully and as conscientiously as they could. Illuminators would base their illustrations on those of their predecessors. The transcript themselves could then become exemplars in turn, and the copying process went on indefinitely across the centuries. Not all manuscripts duplicate every aspect of their models precisely, for the skill of the craftsman and and the circumstances and requirements of the commission may vary greatly, and artistic styles constantly evolve from one generation to the next. Some scripts, however, are remarkably similar to their forbears. The volume which is the subject of our inquiry here, the Leiden Aratea, a poem on ancient astronomy, was, as far as we can tell, an almost exact facsimile of its exemplar, which was then many hundreds of years old. Why that should be, and what it tells us about the aspirations and taste of the Carolingians, are extraordinarily interesting questions.

In the modern world, simple copying is a pejorative concept, especially when applied to literature and art. Writers and artists now stride instead for originality. Plagiarism is anathema. On medieval Europe, however, copying was admired. Artists were trying to imitate each other’s work. Inherited patterns and formulas were dutifully repeated without reference to reality. Authority (auctoritas) was always respected and invoked. Authors deferred to earlier writers, often concealing actual originality in a pretense that it had all been said before. Even in creative fiction, authors such as Boccaccio and Chaucer Opened tales by claiming to have found their narratives in older books. Scientific texts, such as medicine or natural history, were more respected if they reproduced knowledge transmitted from the distant past. The learning of the classical world was especially esteemed. Throughout the middle ages there was a lingering sense of the Greeks and Romans had been culturally superior and that the ancient had known things now forgotten or only hazily preserved. There was a wistful nostalgia for a vanished halcyon age of learning and classical antiquity.

The magpie talents required to tell the story of a manuscript, with extensive cross-checking among other manuscripts and their inventories, help me to understand why I’ve encountered so many medievalists in fandom.

Read if … You’re interested in calligraphy, Medieval Europe, Catholicism, prayer, war, or Chaucer

Avoid if … You’re not