The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

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The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

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Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and the author of The Year That Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, loves and letters of 1845 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Christopher de Hamel's great gift is to tell life stories without taking anything away from the manuscripts, which remain the star of the show. Thanks to the beautiful illustrations in this wonderful book, we can see for ourselves how spellbinding an encounter with them must have been. Five years ago de Hamel entranced the world with his Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts. This time the meetings are with remarkable manuscript owners, and the result is equally precious Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

My one complaint about the book is a technical one, and I don't know if it's only on my ARC, or if the published version (printed or digital) would be this way as well. The "Bibliographies and Notes" at the end of the book take up nearly 20% of the book, but the font is roughly half the size of the rest of the book and there are no paragraph indentations. This makes for a very long, tedious notes section and I truly wish that more of this information had been included in the narrative or at the very least used as individual footnotes. The text is engagingly written, inviting the reader to follow the author on his travels to study these people in their own environments. Throughout his career de Hamel has done an immense amount to make these complex and fascinating artefacts accessible to a wide audience. At times his imaginative leaps demonstrate the gaps between our contemporary questions and the nature of historical records. For example, suggesting medical diagnoses for the people of the past can only ever be extremely speculative. Nevertheless, although the book wears its thorough research lightly, the interested reader will find much valuable information in the endnotes. The epilogue indicates that membership of de Hamel’s club is not restricted to 12; many other characters appear, who may become the subject of a study in their own right. The club is open. The chapter on Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664-1736) is particularly valuable to those of us familiar with Latin manuscripts, but not Hebrew ones, as a reminder of the challenges facing those beginning to work with unfamiliar material, which has been one major reason for the disposal of old manuscripts. In this study de Hamel is accompanied by an expert, Brian Deutsch, who not only translates the Hebrew for him, but gives the reader insights into a different set of values for manuscripts, where old does not necessarily mean valuable and instead originality and rarity of the text are key. Chapter 52: Involving a serious Change in the Weller Family, and the untimely Downfall of Mr. Stigginsgloriously engaging and readable ... De Hamel wears his erudition lightly, and the reader is taken deeply into the worlds of individuals who lived across almost a thousand years of history Richard Ovenden, Financial Times Looking for a good book? The Manuscripts Club, by Christopher de Hamel, biographizes twelve important figures through history who have collected and preserved rare manuscripts. Regular readers of my review blog might recognize that the last person in the book, Belle de Costa Greene, was the subject of the historical fiction novel I reviewed in 2021, The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

Details will be confirmed to registrants ahead of the event. If you have booked to attend online, you will receive a link to the Zoom webinar in the week before the event. Friends of the BodleianWe also meet Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664-1736), many of whose Hebrew manuscripts are now in Oxford’s Bodleian library. The wider significance of Hebrew texts is understated today – indeed, de Hamel writes that “curators are usually astonished and delighted when a gentile shows an interest” – but he is right to do deference to a manuscript tradition that was long held in parallel esteem to Latin or Greek. Henry VIII founded the Regius Professorial chair of Hebrew at Cambridge in 1540, the same year he founded the Greek chair. A scribe (probably Bede) writing, from Life and Miracles of Saint Cuthbert by Bede, 12th century. Bridgeman Images. Chapter 55: Mr. Solomon Pell, assisted by a Select Committee of Coachmen, arranges the affairs of the elder Mr. Weller



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