In the course of a long career at Sotheby's Christopher de Hamel probably handled and catalogued more illuminated manuscripts and over a wider range than any person alive. and] details each document’s idiosyncrasies while contextualizing its time and place of creation…De Hamel’s delightful book is bound to inspire a new set of medievalists. Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s leading palaeographers … In this splendid new book he has numerous fascinating, scandalous, funny and gloriously entertaining tales. With a few deft strokes, De Hamel conjures an atmosphere of awe and reverence in the Matthew Parker library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, of which he is custodian and a fellow librarian.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and was Librarian of the Parker Library from 2000 to 2016, which holds many of the earliest manuscripts in English language and history, including the Psalter of Becket. And in producing such a gorgeous object, Christopher de Hamel’s publisher has had the courage of his convictions, because its physical and visual delights mirror its commercially unlikely subject matter…[De Hamel] is voraciously completist, recording impressions of each journey, place, building and reading room, as well as every coverage detail of each manuscript’s creation, content and existence as a physical object through time and space… On this archival odyssey, I lost count of the things I learned…[ Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts], like the volumes that are its subject, is a book of wonders.He reveals a stupendous discovery has made about this book that no one had noticed in its centuries on this earth. Oh and this should also be made into an audiobook narrated by Mr Hamel himself (especially as the size makes it near impossible for a commute read for those who like to do that, unless you get the paperback version which is not recommended for the reasons above! Christopher de Hamel's exploration of medieval manuscripts - a dozen peaks from St Augustine to Chaucer and beyond, gorgeously and copiously illustrated - is itself an extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author's excitement as he conducts us among the great libraries of Western civilization.

One of the cultural highlights of the autumn…Christopher de Hamel has turned a lifelong obsession with ancient literature into a book that critics are comparing to A History of the World in 100 Objects and the wonderful The Hare with Amber Eyes. As he introduces us to twelve star manuscripts in their sanctuary homes, these complex creations emerge as major players in the great game of ideas and power. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is, like each one of the 12 treasures it celebrates, a book of marvels.The St Augustine Gospels, “the oldest non-archaeological artefact of any kind to have survived in England”, are housed there. One minor point is sometimes the text refers to a picture a few pages ahead or behind which means you have to flick backwards and forwards, but this is a minor criticisms. In a marvellous chapter, De Hamel communicates his excitement at holding the famous Chaucer manuscript at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Parker, likewise, did not see papal purple as a dangerous sign of recusancy, and, indeed, saw a holiness in Augustine.