Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
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  • Published: 29 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141977492
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $29.99

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 Jan 2018
EBook
17 Oct 2016
Audiobook
26 Oct 2017
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The most beguiling and acclaimed history book of 2016, now in paperback

Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person. There is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature. This book is an intimate conversation with a selection of the most famous manuscripts in existence, letting each of those manuscripts illuminate the Middle Ages and sometimes the modern world too. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts invites the reader to accompany the author on exclusive private visits to a dozen very varied collections, in different parts of the world, to discover twelve great manuscripts and to explore their historical and intellectual significance.
  • Published: 29 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141977492
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Christopher de Hamel

In the course of a long career at Sotheby's and at Cambridge University, Christopher de Hamel has probably seen and catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive, and his delight and enthusiasm run through all he writes. He is the author of many books, translated into numerous languages, including A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, The Book in the Cathedral, and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Also by Christopher de Hamel

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club
The Book in the Cathedral
See all

Praise for Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author's excitement as he conducts us among the great libraries of Western civilization. It is full of delights

Tom Stoppard

A book of marvels

John Banville, Financial Times

The intellectual expedition of a lifetime ... This is an endlessly fascinating and enjoyable book.

Neil MacGregor

Entrancing ... 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. They are also much funnier.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Reading is my life, but only about once a decade do I find a book that seems to tilt the world, so afterwards it appears different.

Fiammetta Rocco, The Economist '1843'

De Hamel's book, scholarly but unfailingly readable, is the beginning of wisdom in all things scribal and scriptural - Ian Thomson, The Observer

Ian Thomson, The Observer
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