Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

This is an engaging study of twelve illuminated manuscripts. Renowned historian Christopher de Hamel invites the reader to an intimate conversation with medieval texts to learn what they tell us about nearly a thousand-year history—and also about the modern world. De Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, traders, and collectors. He invites readers on journey after journey full of absorbing details carried out by these incredibly valuable artifacts through time—and shows us how they were copied, how closely they were intertwined with politics, how they were regarded as objects of the highest beauty and symbols of national identity, and who owned them—or longed to possess them (and how we can now learn and determine that). The book is published with the support of the electronic academic scientific journal "Vox medii aevi".