reading

Introduction

This is a book about visiting important medieval manuscripts and what they tell us and why they matter. As first envisaged, it was to be called ‘Interviews With Manuscripts’, and indeed the chapters are not unlike a series of celebrity interviews. Actual interviews – traditional published interviews with well-known people – usually set the scene and describe the circumstances of how the encounters came to happen at all. They generally attempt to evoke something of the experience of meeting and interacting with the interviewees. You will already have had information in advance, of course, but what are the people like in reality, when they finally come to the door, shake your hand and usher you to a seat? The accounts may say something of their physical presence and perhaps their clothes, demeanour and style of conversation. We may all pretend that a well-known person is really no different from any other human being, but there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to someone of world stature. Is he or she, in fact, charismatically impressive, or (as sometimes) rather disappointing? You might seek to discover how people became famous and whether their reputations are deserved. Listen to them and let them speak. A good interviewer may be able to elicit secrets which were entirely unknown and which the famous person had meant to keep quiet. There is even a certain voyeurism for the reader in eavesdropping as these intimate confessions are teased out.

The most celebrated illuminated manuscripts in the world are, to most of us, as inaccessible in reality as very famous people. To a large extent, anyone with stamina and a travel budget can get to see many of the great paintings and architectural monuments, and may stand today in the presence of the Great Wall of China or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. But try – just try – to have the Book of Kells removed from its glass case in Dublin so that you can turn the pages. It won’t happen. The majority of the greatest medieval manuscripts are now almost never on public exhibition at all, even in darkened display cases, and if they are, you can see only a single opening. They are too fragile and too precious. It is easier to meet the Pope or the President of the United States than it is to touch the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Access gets harder, year by year. The idea of this book, then, is to invite the reader to accompany the author on a private journey to see, handle and interview some of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Palaeographers, the general term for those of us who study old manuscripts, become accustomed to working in the reading-rooms of rare-book libraries, but these are sanctuaries as out of bounds to the general public as the tomb of the Prophet in Medina would be to me. Modern national libraries are among the costliest public buildings ever constructed, but few people actually penetrate as far as the exclusive tables set aside for consultation of the most valuable books of all. Some settings for studying manuscripts are stately and intimidating, and others are endearingly informal. Access is a secret of initiates, and formulas for admission and the handling of manuscripts vary hugely from one repository to another. This is an aspect of the history of scholarship often entirely neglected. The supreme illuminated books of the Middle Ages are cornerstones of our culture, but hardly anyone bothers to document their habitat.

Some of these great manuscripts may be known from facsimiles or from digitized images available on-line, as accessible and as familiar as authorized biographies of well-known people, but no copy is the same as an original. The experience of encounter is entirely different. Facsimiles are rootless and untied to any place. No one can properly know or write about a manuscript without having seen it and held it in the hands. No photographic reproduction yet invented has the weight, texture, uneven surface, indented ruling, thickness, smell, the tactile quality and patina of time of an actual medieval book, and nothing can compare with the thrill of excitement when a supremely famous manuscript itself is finally laid on the table in front of you. You do not merely see it, as under glass, but really get to touch it and peer into its crevices. There will always be details which no one has seen before. You will make discoveries every time. Unnoticed evidence may be wrested from signs of manufacture, erasures, scratches, overpainting, offsets, patches, sewing-holes, bindings, and nuances of colour and texture, all entirely invisible in any reproduction. The questions manuscripts can answer face-to-face are sometimes unexpected, both about themselves and about the times in which they were made. There are new observations and hypotheses in every chapter here, elicited by nothing cleverer than engaging the originals. Look closely. Use a magnifying glass, if you like. Sit back: turn the pages and listen quietly to what the books tell us. Let them talk. Apart from anything else, this is enormously enjoyable and interesting. Medieval manuscripts have biographies. They have all survived through the centuries, interacting with successive owners and ages, neglected or admired, right into our own times. We will disentangle provenances which were entirely unknown. Sometimes these histories are very dramatic, as books take their place in European affairs at the highest level, from the bed chambers of medieval saints and kings to the secret hiding-places of Nazi Germany. Habent sua fata libelli. Some manuscripts have hardly stirred from their original shelves since the day they were completed; there are others which have zig-zagged across the known world in wooden chests or saddle bags swaying on the backs of horses or over the oceans in little sailing ships or as aircraft freight, for books are very portable. Many have at some time passed through commerce and the auction rooms, and the prices attached to them as they transited are a part of the changing history of taste and fashion. The life of every manuscript, like that of every person, is different, and all have stories to divulge.

A dozen manuscripts have been selected for interview here. No one really knows how many medieval manuscripts survive throughout the world – maybe a million, perhaps more – and the choice was very wide indeed. They are all potentially fascinating and even the plainest and scruffiest of those manuscripts would have offered up enough material to fill a chapter of this book, but it might have made a less glamorous experience for the reader. We are going to be moving in grand company. As you sit in the reading-room of a library turning the pages of some dazzlingly illuminated volume, you can sense a certain respect from your fellow students on neighbouring tables consulting more modest books or archives, and I hope to share a flavour of that quiet satisfaction of associating with celebrated manuscripts, which for a short while are to become our intimate companions. Join me in a bit of self-indulgent namedropping. Among these titans I have tried to choose a representative range of different kinds of medieval book, not all Gospels and Books of Hours but also texts of astronomy, biblical commentaries, music, literature and Renaissance politics. We could also have opted for liturgy, medicine, law, history, romance, heraldry, philosophy, travel, or many other subjects widely covered in manuscripts of the Middle Ages. I have singled out volumes which seemed to me characteristic of each century, from the sixth to the sixteenth. They all tell us something about their times and the societies which made them.

I have been to see every one of these manuscripts for the purpose of writing this book. I had handled some of them before, but I came now with no particular expectations of what I wanted them to tell us, and any new revelations – and there are certainly some – were offered up by the manuscripts during the course of the encounters described here. The narrative will show this happening.

Manuscripts are not all the same size. The miniature nature of the illuminator’s craft is part of the fascination of medieval manuscripts, but some of these books are enormous. Those who study the history of art exclusively from reproductions, either reduced in textbooks or magnified onto lecture screens, lose all sense of the relative scale of one manuscript to another. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a strong feeling for the hierarchy of things, both in the natural and the human worlds, often expressed by size. The book with the largest dimensions here is the Codex Amiatinus, a pandect (as it is called) of the entire Scriptures, written for public display. The smallest is the dainty Book of Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, made for the hands of a queen. When a manuscript is delivered to your desk in a library, even before you open it, there is often an unexpected realization of how big or small it is. As a trick of design therefore, each chapter begins with a picture of the particular manuscript shown closed. That for the Codex Amiatinus is illustrated as large as the dimensions of this book will allow: the bindings of all others in turn are then shown at the start of each chapter in scale relative to that largest reproduction.

Certain themes will become clear as we proceed. Chapter One on the Gospel Book of Saint Augustine takes us into the age when a new Christian literacy was emerging from the collapse of ancient Rome. The Codex Amiatinus in Chapter Two is the oldest surviving Latin Bible, sent to Italy from the ends of the earth, as its dedication declares, by those who prided themselves on their Roman learning. The incomparable Book of Kells, forming Chapter Three, is a very different kind of manuscript of the four Gospels and we are immersed in that distant Celtic world where magic and belief are inseparable and eventually have a part to play in the modern sense of Irish national identity. Chapter Four is about copying manuscripts and copying cultures. The headlong race to the millennium and the anticipated apocalypse preoccupied the tenth century and they fill Chapter Five. The far-reaching and sober effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066 can be experienced graphically and first-hand in the manuscripts examined in Chapter Six. The twelfth century marks a major shift from monastic to secular book production, a watershed in the history of literacy and art, and is one of the under-appreciated turning-points of our civilization. In Chapter Seven we will decipher the name of the king who personally owned one of the finest Psalters of the time. In Chapter Eight we pick up a little book in Munich and find the songs of love and lust of the students and wandering scholars of the early thirteenth century. Chapter Nine introduces a delicate Book of Hours made for a king’s daughter, who, like her manuscript, became the pawn of politics, in a tale which then stretches in an unbroken thread of possession from the troubled dynasty of Saint Louis of France to Hermann Göring. Chapter Ten on the Canterbury Tales brings the beginning of recognizable English literature and book publishing, with a sub-text on the responsibilities and dangers of literary scholarship. The Semideus of Chapter Eleven is on warfare and armaments, and modern Russia. We end with Chapter Twelve on luxury and money. Between them, the dozen interviews here tell a story of intellectual culture and art from the final moments of the Roman Empire right through to the high Renaissance and then on again, transmitting these manuscripts from their own times through into our contemporary world.

All these books have certain features in common, apart from fame. They are all manuscripts: the word simply means ‘written by hand’. That was not out of choice. Until the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, all books were necessarily copied by scribes. Nearly all medieval manuscripts are decorated in some way, at the very least with coloured initials and very often with gold and pictures. Most are undated and have no title-pages. Pages of books were rarely numbered in the Middle Ages. The modern convention, which I use here, is to count the leaves, not the pages, and to number each according to its front (recto) or back (verso), generally abbreviated to ‘r’ and ‘v’. Most manuscripts from medieval Europe, including all those described here, were written on animal skin (for most purposes the words parchment and vellum are interchangeable). Oblong rectangles of parchment were folded in half and arranged one inside another to form clusters, commonly but not always of eight leaves or sixteen pages, which could eventually be sewn down their central folds. Each section is called a ‘quire’ or a ‘gathering’, like a signature in a modern hard-bound printed book. A whole series of quires bound in sequence would make up an entire manuscript. I am explaining this in some detail because it is important for what is known as the ‘collation’ of a manuscript, which forms a crucial part of every chapter here. Palaeographers express this in a formula which looks at first sight as impenetrable as a knitting pattern or a sequence of DNA, but which is quite precise and simple in reality. Each quire is imagined as being numbered in lower case Roman numerals, and the number of leaves in each is written in superscript Arabic numbers. Thus, to take an easy example, a manuscript of eighty-six leaves formed of ten quires of eight leaves each followed by one of six leaves would be expressed as: i–x⁸, xi⁶. Many medieval manuscripts – probably most of them, in fact, one way or another – are now no longer complete. Say that same manuscript once had eighty-six leaves but is now reduced to eighty-three by the loss of single leaves at each end and one somewhere in the middle. The collation might be given as: i7 [of 8, lacking i, a single leaf before folio 1], ii–v⁸, vi⁷ [of 8, lacking iii, a single leaf after folio 41], vii–x⁸, xi⁵ [of 6, lacking vi, a single leaf after folio 83].

As will become apparent as we look at each manuscript, the collations prove to be extremely important. They will sometimes reveal gaps in the text or picture cycles where no one had ever expected them. To know a manuscript we need to have a sense of what was once there when it was new. More importantly, a collation takes us back to the separate units in which a manuscript was originally made. It is striking how collaborating scribes and illuminators evidently divided their labour according to assignments of loose quires, and a change of hand very often occurs between one quire and the next. We will see this from the Codex Amiatinus of the late seventh century right through to the Spinola Hours 800 years later. I confess that I love collating manuscripts. It is strangely satisfying to work it out quire by quire and to find that the total adds up reassuringly to the precise number of pages in the book. The answer should be absolute. You peer into the central folds, looking for the sewing threads, and you gradually build up a series of V-shaped diagrams of the structure throughout the volume. This would be entirely impossible from a facsimile or microfilm, and it often furnishes the magic key for the separation of hands and the units of text. I have sometimes thought that if I ever retire I should call my pensioner’s cottage ‘Duncollatin’.

Another feature which is recurrent through all the chapters here is that, unlike a printed book which mostly rolls off a press in a single process, any manuscript was written over time. It may even have been begun at one period and then have been adapted or completed in further phases of activity. A manuscript is a bit like a building or a piece of large hand-made furniture, which can be left unfinished for a while, or it can be partly taken apart again and reconfigured, with additions or removals, forever being adapted to the whims and needs of its successive owners. Some of the apparent mysteries of manuscripts interviewed here are solved by the sudden realization of more than one moment of production.

If there is a single theme which I would try to convey if we were actually undertaking these journeys together, it is what pleasure you can have in looking at manuscripts. I hope that something of the enjoyment emerges from these encounters. Of course I am the most biased person in the world, but I think that medieval manuscripts are truly fascinating at so many levels. I want to know everything about them. I want to know who made them and when and why and where, and what they contain and where their texts came from, why a particular manuscript was thought to be needed, and how they were copied and under what conditions and how these affected the format and size, what materials were used, how long the manuscripts took to make, why and how they were decorated and by whom (if they were decorated, and why not, if they weren’t), and what they cost, how they were bound, who used them and in what way, how or whether they were retransmitted onwards in further copies, what changes were made to them later, where they were kept, how they were shelved and catalogued, how they have survived often against all odds, who has owned them, how they were bought and sold and for how much (for they were always valuable), under what circumstances they reached the custody of their current owners – and, at every one of these questions, how we can tell. We can enjoy ourselves poking impertinently into the affairs of men and women of long ago, and sharing the same original artefacts which gave delight to those people too.

The idea for this book arose out of a conversation with Caroline Dawnay. I had urged her, as I often do urge people without expecting anything to happen, to come to see the Parker Library any time she was in Cambridge. One day she turned up without warning, with half an hour to spare. She had never particularly looked at medieval manuscripts. We got out a volume of the Bury Bible, one of the first English books made by a professional illuminator, written around 1130. The enchantment of that wide-eyed encounter, for me as much as for her, suggested the challenge of trying to convey to a wider audience the thrill of bringing a well-informed but non-specialist reader into intimate contact with major medieval manuscripts.

I have tried to avoid using technical terms known only to specialized historians. If these were actual visits to libraries, I would encourage you to interrupt if anything seemed unclear or too complicated. This should be as near to a conversation as a published book can be. For that reason, I have resisted the temptation to scatter the text with footnotes. I, for one, am incapable of reading any footnoted book without holding fingers between multiple pages, which slows the narrative and bores the layman. For those who care, and many will not, there are separate and discursive bibliographies and notes for each chapter. These have had their own problems of composition. I have been on familiar terms with some of these manuscripts, or have known about them, for more than forty years and I do not necessarily recall the sources of everything I have read. Worse than this, I am afraid that people have told me things and have suggested ideas, and I may have forgotten. I have tried to make acknowledgements in the text itself or in the notes. I am indebted too to all the curators who received my visits with good grace and often with information. We who work in palaeography are conscious of whole international networks of like-minded historians and bibliographers, and we gladly help one another when we can. We talk in the vestibules of libraries and gossip at conferences. We ask advice by email. We sometimes stay in each other’s houses. I hope that it will become apparent that a book like this is only made possible by a lifetime of friends and colleagues.

There are two people I would like to single out at the beginning. The first, of course, is my wife, Mette, who has endured the writing for several years and who graciously appears as the subject of several jokes in the text. (This is a trick by me: she will have to read the book to find them.) The other is my old friend Scott Schwartz of New York, who discussed the project with me at its outset and helped define its parameters. Through a period of ill-health, now thank goodness abated, he read the first draft of every chapter as it was finished, and I owe much to his wisdom and perception. It is to him I dedicate this book.

Christopher De Hamel

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS

ALLEN LANE

Contents

Introduction