DR MARY WELLESLEY is a medieval specialist, and her enviable book is an introduction to the scholarly world of Western manuscripts until the invention of movable type and printing in the second half of the 15th century rendered them largely obsolete. After an introductory chapter on how a manuscript was made, including the author’s own experience of a stint working in a tannery, we learn how scribes toiled, patrons commissioned, and artists translated the written word into a world of colour, embellishing the margins of many texts.
The more adventurous chapters chart how many manuscripts were long neglected (the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest bound book in Europe, and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur), and how others were lost to fire and flood. Beowulf and many other unique manuscripts narrowly survived the 1731 London fire at Ashburnham House. Much else was lost.
Much of the book summarises the scholarship of others, allowing the reader to become as acquainted with the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Luttrell Psalter as with the family correspondence that charts the extraordinary history of a Norfolk family, the Pastons, from the death of Henry V to the accession of Henry VIII.
The extensive bibliography of hyperlinks shows just what could be achieved in lockdown, as many libraries had now digitised their archives. But, for the moment, we must still travel to Munich to find Hugeburc’s Lives of Sts Wynnebald and Willibald, in which the female author disguised her identity in code; or to the Huntington Library (San Marino, California) to see the Ellesmere copy of The Canterbury Tales.
Marginal notes and autobiographical interventions in the handwritten texts offer a sidelight on the life of the scriptorium and of household scribes. The Prince Bishop of Durham Richard de Bury (1287-1343) was outraged that a headstrong youth did not clean the grime from his fingernails before picking up a book; and an otherwise unnamed scribe proudly scribbled Caedmon’s Trinitarian hymn alongside a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. The Dominican John Siferwas, one of the scribes of the Sherborne Missal, immodestly inserted no fewer than ten self-portraits.
AlamyThe young Moses slays the Egyptian in retribution for the tormenting of the Hebrew, by the Master of the Leaping Figures, in the Winchester Bible, fol. 21v. This is one of several parts of that manuscript illustrated in the book under review
There is no denying Wellesley’s enthusiasm for her subject, although occasionally a more diligent copy editor might have reminded her of her readership. The colloquialisms “weren’t”, “aren’t”, and “we’ve” occur within pages of “bibliophilic” and before the helpful ten-page glossary is signposted.
Not all the illustrations are referred to in the text (and, when they are, some plates are designated figures), making for confusion at times, especially in the description of Henry VIII’s prayer-book. The vernacular reading of a charter from St Albans Minster of 1042-49 (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale) of “Ægelwine swearte” (page 6) is illustrated by a later Latin copy (Plate 2) for Egelwynus ye Swarte in the British Library.
I puzzled that the indefinite article takes “n” before “c”. This gives “an [sic] condensed version” (page 5) when Wellesley primly discusses the representation of a man of African descent in the margin of a 13th-century copy of the Domesday Book (1085) without comment on how he grasps his membrum virile in his right hand (Plate 1). Not all hands are hidden.
Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.
Hidden Hands: The lives of manuscripts and their makers
Mary Wellesley
Riverrun £25
(978-1–52940-093–9)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50