In the early 1070s, the monk Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to St. Anselm, abbot of Bec in Normandy, seeking a significant favor: he wanted to borrow a book. Two, actually. The volumes Lanfranc sought comprised the Moralia in Job, a commentary on the Book of Job by Pope Gregory the Great. Written some five centuries earlier, it would have to be copied by scribes in the cathedral city of Caen. 

Lanfranc wasn’t the only cleric looking to borrow the Moralia. Among copies of Anselm’s letters, now in the British Library, is one he wrote to a fellow cleric apologizing for not being able to accommodate a similar request. “Do not think we do not want to lend it to you,” Anselm explained. As soon as the copyists at Caen finished with it, the abbot wrote, “we will gladly hand it to your lord’s messenger.” 

Frustrating as it could be to have cherished books “forever absent on loan to scribes elsewhere,” that was one price monasteries paid for the privilege of producing and collecting manuscripts, which were often lavishly illuminated. The journey of the Moralia was just one of many examples of how such manuscripts changed hands over the centuries, their tortuous paths compellingly traced in an appropriately lavish volume by British academic librarian and medieval manuscript authority Christopher de Hamel.

De Hamel devotes each of the book’s twelve chapters to a different historical figure, whether producer or collector, from the eleventh through the early twentieth centuries. Some are saints, others con-men, with varying levels of wealth and belief in God. All share a passion for illuminated manuscripts that over time were “bought and sold, neglected or treasured, used, copied, taken apart and not always reassembled, rediscovered, loved, read, ignored, identified,” and ultimately deposited in public collections like the British Library.

For the monks of Bec and other monastic communities throughout Europe, books were “necessary at the very least for the daily recitation of the liturgy” but also facilitated theological study and contemplative devotion. Most surviving European manuscripts dating before 1100 were produced in monastic settings—the continent’s “earliest publishing houses,” as de Hamel calls them—where the copying of a religious text “was itself a devotional exercise.”

Laypeople—almost always wealthy ones such as France’s Duc de Berry—commissioned and collected them as well. The Duc’s Tres Riches Heures, a sumptuously illustrated prayer book made around 1415, ostensibly aided his private prayer. Yet it was also a showpiece, a prized possession that featured among other conspicuous devotional objects, including the supposed engagement ring given to the Virgin Mary by Joseph, acquired in Venice. (The duke’s treasurer was skeptical of the ring’s authenticity.)

Further south, in Florence, book production evolved from the devotional to the transactional, with prominent booksellers like Vespasiano da Bisticci rising to prominence during the late fifteenth century. Noticing the increasingly wealthy lay public’s growing appetite for classic texts in Greek and Latin, Vespasiano “had the acumen to capture the thrill of the moment and to turn it into a business,” stocking the libraries of powerful figures like Cosimo de’ Medici. Tellingly, one of Vespasiano’s scribes signed and dated the last page of a five-volume set of the works of Cicero on a Sunday, when no monastic scribe would ever work.

Religious books remained in demand, however, giving rise to a “fraternity of professionals” that included not only scribes, parchment sellers, and bookbinders, but painters as well. One of the most skilled was Belgium’s Simon Bening, whose detailed scenes of the Nativity, the denial of Peter, and portraits of Mary in pastoral settings made him one of the most sought-after illustrators of the sixteenth century. De Hamel’s visit to Bening’s home city of Bruges yields an encounter with Brody Neuenschwander, a modern scribe and illuminator. Such is Neuenschwander’s dedication to emulating Bening’s work that he even uses quills made from swan feathers gathered along Bruges’s canals.

De Hamel devotes later chapters to collectors and preservationists. The classification system devised by England’s Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), who organized books according to the names of successive Roman emperors, is still in use at the British Library, where most of what remains of his once-sizable collection is now kept. In 1731, a devastating fire consumed such treasures as an original copy of the Magna Carta while singeing the edges of the earliest known copy of Beowulf. Three centuries later, preservationists are still working on restoring charred remains from Cotton’s collection. If there was an upside to the disaster, according to de Hamel, it directed attention to the “pressing necessity of securing the safety and future” of England’s national collections and led to the creation of institutions like the British Library.

Of course, private libraries remained important sites for manuscript collection. Sir Thomas Phillips (1792–1872), an “ill tempered” and covetous collector, became so obsessed with acquiring historic manuscripts that he fell into debt, cramming nearly every corner of his Cotswold manor house with one of the world’s largest private collections: sixty thousand manuscripts and fifty thousand books. 

Phillips’s hunger for rare, antique manuscripts made him an easy mark for the forger and confidence man Constantine Simonides. A Greek national, Simonides bluffed his way into many of Europe’s academic and private libraries, peddling phony scraps of rare manuscripts, like a Gospel of Mark on papyrus and scrolls containing the works of Hesiod and Pythagoras. Perhaps the most astounding item in his inventory—the antiquity of which was achieved by smearing the document’s surface with tobacco juice—was a classical era scroll of Homer’s Iliad, which Phillips eagerly snatched up a copy.

Other collectors, like Belle de Costa Greene (1879-1950), private librarian to Wall Street magnate J. Pierpont Morgan, were more virtuous. In de Hamel’s telling, Greene “almost single-handedly created the fashion for millionaire manuscript libraries,” thereby laying the foundation for great museum collections like New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. Greene eventually served as director of the Morgan, home to “the finest public collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts outside Europe.”

There’s an evident cliquishness and wonkishness in the study of manuscripts, something the title of de Hamel’s book gestures at. But as the author demonstrates, with his obvious passion for medieval manuscripts and vast erudition rivaling those of the subject he profiles, that club needn’t be a closed one. 

The Manuscripts Club
The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts 
Christopher de Hamel
Penguin Books
624 pp. | $50