Come in, but keep your voices down

The illustrated manuscripts of the European Middle Ages are among the most beautiful works to survive from a maligned and misrepresented age. The darkest of the Dark Ages produced the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Out of the most vicious period of France’s medieval history emerged the exquisite books of hours painted by the Limbourg brothers for the repellent Duke of Berry. Yet, unlike the panel paintings, the sculpture, the buildings or the jewellery of the period, illustrated manuscripts are almost entirely inaccessible to the public. Light, oxygen and humidity, the three great enemies of pictorial artefacts, are especially unkind to manuscripts. Vellum is made of animal skin, which naturally decays. Vege-table dyes fade. Mineral pigments discolour.

And to these real dangers, modern librarians are apt to add imaginary ones, born of their firm conviction that even the world of scholarship is populated by vandals. The result is that most of these wonderful works are rarely shown, except in private to privileged persons of austere habits and unimpeachable expert credentials, a treatment that respectable libraries used to reserve for works of pornography.

One of these privileged persons is Christ-opher de Hamel. He has pursued his enthusiasm for medieval illustrated manuscripts ever since, as a teenager, he discovered the eclectic joys of the Reed Collection in Dunedin’s public library in his native New Zealand. After a quarter of a century working in the western manuscripts department of Sotheby’s, he finally found his natural niche in 2000 as fellow-librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and custodian of the college’s Parker Library, one of the greatest antiquarian manuscript collections in the world. He is one of the few people who can ask to handle a precious manuscript and expect its custodians to agree.