The Book in the Cathedral

A brilliant memoir from the bestselling author of Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts<BR><BR>Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home.<BR><BR>The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture - of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters - bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth.<BR><BR>This is a coming-of-age saga with extraordinary twists, crossing many hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles, recounted with passion, humour and a lifetime's reflection.

Eine faszinierende Reise in die Welt des MittelaltersEine Reise durch Raum und Zeit tritt an, wer mit Christopher de Hamel den Spuren zwölf bedeutender mittelalterlicher Handschriften folgt. Im Zwiegespräch mit diesen Kostbarkeiten und ihrem wechselvollen Schicksal entfaltet sich ein Jahrtausend Geschichte. Ob das geheimnisvolle Stundenbuch der Königin von Navarra oder das Book of Kells - der Leser und Betrachter begegnet Herrschern und Heiligen, Künstlern und Dieben, Bibliothekaren und Sammlern, einer verschworenen Gemeinschaft von Gelehrten, die den Weg der Handschriften beeinflussten. Und wird Zeuge, wie sie behütet und gestohlen, versteckt und wiederentdeckt wurden. Wie sie verwickelt waren in Tragödien voller Leidenschaft und Gier, in kirchliche oder politische Ränke und zu Symbolen für Schönheit, Luxus und nationale Identität aufstiegen. De Hamel entwirft ein glanzvolles Epos um Kunst, Glauben und Macht, wie es sich im Zauber zwölf faszinierender Handschriften manifestiert. Besondere Ausstattung: prachtvoll illustriert, durchgehend vierfarbigAusstattung: durchgehend farbig illustriert

'Exquisite... intelligent, illuminating, mischievous ... delightful The Times<BR><BR>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<BR><BR>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. But 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.<BR><BR>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 America - all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club.<BR><BR>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 Hamel's unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been.<BR><BR>In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript 'at a bookseller's 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 gold - as many of them were - cannot be told.' The members of de Hamel's club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime's experience.