Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts review
A remote town in southern Italy, Rossano, is home to a sixth-century Greek manuscript illustrating the life of Christ. The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace. Each year, with great solemnity, the cathedral authorities turn a page for public view. (Page 18 was on display when I visited in 1988; we shall be dead before the last page.) Strikingly, in the Last Supper scene, the disciples are shown eating with their fingers at a low, eastern-style table. In Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem at that time, tables neatly laid with plates and rolls of bread were not known. (Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was anachronistic.)
According to manuscript historian Christopher de Hamel, Rossano’s gospel book was kept in a box in the archdeacon’s bedroom until 1889, when a classicist from England arrived to buy it. (The deal was vetoed at the 11th hour after the cleric pitched too high.) Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. 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. Dealers and collectors of one stripe or another have sent calligraphic masterworks to places far from home. “Manuscript migration”, De Hamel calls it.
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. Encountering an original medieval manuscript is in some ways like encountering a famous person, says De Hamel. With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden “character” of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. Erasures and scrapings, a scribal error here, a jumbled foliation there, can tell us much about the scholarly disputes, patrons and politics of the times. Illuminated Anglo-Saxon translations of the Bible (of which Northumbria’s Lindisfarne Gospels is the oldest to have survived) at times encouraged antisemitism. An Old English version of the Old Testament, for example, mistranslated Moses’s face as gehyrned, or “horned”. In the medieval mind, it followed that Jews had devilish horns. (Michelangelo’s 1513 statue of Moses is the best known of such depictions.)
De Hamel’s urbane book is crowded with evidence of vandalism. Decorative borders to the medieval Book of Kells, that “iconic symbol of Irish culture”, were heedlessly trimmed by a bookbinder in 1825. While rats and humidity do much of the damage (“parchment is protein, edible to rodents”), man is by a long chalk the worst offender. In a marvellous chapter, De Hamel communicates his excitement at holding the famous Chaucer manuscript at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of Middle English literature, was copied down by Chaucer’s scribe Adam Pinkhurst; though the parchment is grievously damaged, it marks the earliest attempt to circulate Chaucer’s tales in 14th-century London.
With a few deft strokes, De Hamel conjures an atmosphere of awe and reverence in the Matthew Parker library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, of which he is custodian and a fellow librarian. The St Augustine Gospels, “the oldest non-archaeological artefact of any kind to have survived in England”, are housed there. The book, created in Italy in the sixth century, reputedly accompanied St Augustine on his 597 papal mission to convert the English to Christianity. For Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics alike, the book is a religious relic of the “highest spiritual order”, says De Hamel. It was donated to Corpus Christi in 1575 by the archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, decades after the dissolution of the monasteries. As De Hamel points out, the reformed Church of England was not as rigorously anti-Catholic as its continental equivalents. It is even doubtful how anti-Roman Parker’s patron Elizabeth I really was; she was known to keep a crucifix, candles and other crypto-catholic ornaments in her bedside cabinet. Parker, likewise, did not see papal purple as a dangerous sign of recusancy, and, indeed, saw a holiness in Augustine.
Fascinatingly, the Mediterranean-coloured pictorial squares of the Parker Library manuscript are said to resemble the primitive-looking narrative cycles of religious scenes found in Ethiopia’s orthodox churches. “Very little has changed in religious practice in Ethiopia since about the date of the Gospels of Saint Augustine,” De Hamel notes. Indeed, Ethiopia converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD, when the Ark of the Covenant – the Old Testament casket lined with gold to accommodate the two tablets bearing the 10 Commandments – was allegedly transferred there from southern Egypt. Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is chock-full of such intriguing detail.
Palaeographers often base initial judgments on the “aspect” or ductus of a hand, which may include the angle of the copyist’s hand script against the page or the spacing between letters. 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. 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.
De Hamel’s book, scholarly but unfailingly readable, is the beginning of wisdom in all things scribal and scriptural.
Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is published by Penguin (£30). Click here to buy it for £24.60
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaG9no5q9cH6UaKSenaSeu6i%2FjKucppmioK6juMRmpJqmpaiws7XPrapmm5intrTAzqmfnqpdna6usctmoKWkpaK2r63Tnps%3D