The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel, London: Allen Lane, 2026, 320pps., £19.65
For fifty-five years, Christopher de Hamel has been producing coruscating books attesting to his fascination with manuscripts as artistic treasures and witnesses to history, and his empathy with enthusiasts of all countries and times. The Migrants brings the story home, revealing how his own life has been coloured and enriched by these precious pieces of paper, and drawing arresting parallels between the histories of humans and the trajectories of books.
In 1955, a steamer named the Rangitoto brought the de Hamels from England to New Zealand. Like all migrants, the family sought new horizons, but carried inside themselves elements of old existences. Christopher, then just four, was to discover that many of the archipelago’s other emigres had equally contradictory emotions.
New Zealand was very far from England, and very new, with Europeans only settling in appreciable numbers after 1840. Even the Māori had only arrived in the thirteenth century. The exoticism of the landscapes, flora, fauna and the Māori intoxicated some colonists, but the self-same qualities also impelled others to cling to ‘home’. New settlements were laid out like British towns, churches and universities were built on Gothic Revival models, and administrators and intellectuals sought to acclimatize everything from familiar farm animals to the Protestant religion. A relatively leisured minority starred to seek out old manuscripts evoking a more settled sort of civilization.
Young Christopher stammered and suffered from acne. He was also prone to sudden transports – such as the childish epiphany that the moon silvering the restless waters of Otago harbour was the one that had been worshipped in Babylon. On first seeing a fifteenth century French missal in Auckland, he records, “I gazed past saints straight into landscapes of the fifteenth century; the dusty New Zealand cabbage trees and trolleybuses of that hot Auckland summer vanished as I was transported into blue hills and cool rivers and forests of medieval France.” He was schooled partly in England, and during that sojourn and other trips devoured cultural riches, from Stonehenge and the Alfred Jewel to the Magna Carta. In Rome, he walked in Julius Caesar’s footsteps; at Athens, he stood where King Aegeus could have seen ominously black-sailed ships returning from their meeting with the Minotaur.
Back in New Zealand, he was fortuitously able to get access to medieval documents – much easier than it would have been in England. He began copying these, sometimes suffering setbacks. In 1965, he diarised, “Spilt black ink over most of my Codex Sinaiticus”– a strange sort of teenage trouble. When he and his brother visited Los Angeles, they had an unusual itinerary: “I do not know what most teenage boys on their own for the first time in their lives would do with two unsupervised nights in California in the 1960s. We went out to the Huntington Library to see the Gutenberg Bible and the Ellesmere Chaucer.” Aged 20, he ventured into print with Books of Hours, a study of manuscripts at Dunedin. At 25, he was in London, cataloguing manuscripts for Sotheby’s, for whom he worked for 25 years. He also adorned prestigious academic posts, spending 19 years as librarian of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, home to some of the oldest books in Europe.
The world of palaeography is small, but the books palaeographers study open up huge possibilities. De Hamel unflaggingly follows fragments to find connections between seemingly sundered worlds, delighted whenever he can link unpretentious Antipodean towns with great monastic foundations or individuals. He travels indefatigably on atmosphere-amassing or verificatory errands, whether walking the 112 miles Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, or simply going to south London to find the battered remains of one New Zealand collector’s family home. He has been seeking one Cumbrian Bible fragment for 60 years.
Manuscripts hold huge suggestive force. In Wellington, there is a twelfth century copy of Boethius’ philosophical work De Musica, bound with a copy of the eleventh century Benedictine Guido d’Arezzo’s Micrologus, which introduced the musical stave, and the do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti notation scheme (derived from the opening letters of lines of a Latin hymn to St John). This volume had been in Canterbury Cathedral, and may have been commissioned personally by Thomas Becket when he became Archbishop in 1162. As the author rhapsodises, “Who could not be moved…to realise that this manuscript was probably present in the cloister in Canterbury when St Thomas Becket strode around it and in through the side door into the north transept of the cathedral, followed by the four royal knights with swords, moments before his martyrdom?” As Bishop of Durham Richard de Bury noted in his 1345 Philobiblon, “In books, I find the dead as if they were alive.”
Some manuscripts now in New Zealand were originally in major European abbeys, getting to aristocratic English libraries during the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars. Subsequently, these were often displaced again, sold to keep country estates afloat after the introduction of punitive taxation. The Master of Knox College in Dunedin, where de Hamel studied, was a former army padre who won the Military Cross at Monte Cassino – and spirited away an early copy of St John Chrysostom. Other manuscripts emanated from England, somehow surviving the ‘biblioclastic’ frenzies of the Reformation, but long languishing unread, or cut up to be used for profane purposes, or sold as profitable single leaves.
Dissectors were not always motivated by money; Dissenters like New Zealand bibliophile-publisher Alfred Hamish Read (1875-1975), felt that spreading the pages of early religious texts widely would simultaneously spread The Word. Reed’s impressive collection was bequeathed to the Dunedin Public Library. In 1964, the nonagenarian Reed met a teenage boy looking at some of these in the glass cases, and opened one to allow him to touch a medieval manuscript for the first time. That teenager was, of course, Christopher de Hamel.
New Zealand’s first serious manuscript collector was Sir George Grey (1812-1898), twice Governor of the colony, who would become its Prime Minister. He built himself a house on Kawau Island off the east coast, and filled it with treasures, in 1848 alone purchasing 14 “Missals and Illuminated Manuscripts” from London dealers, all later left to the Auckland public library. He was deeply proud of his role in bringing these piquant documents to this uttermost outpost, and had his name and new coat of arms inserted inside them, simultaneously aligning himself with old Europe and making himself part of the volumes’ physical history. Grey is caricatured today as an oppressor, but de Hamel defends him for his bookish philanthropy.
The author is exemplarily even-handed when it comes to politics, committed to the kind of comparative cosmopolitanism that inspired the world’s greatest libraries and museums. He writes, “Some people may now deplore the acquisition by European museums of treasure from Easter Island or Benin, or looted from the Forbidden City, or even presented by Māori chieftains to Captain Cook, but the movement of artefacts went the other way too.” He rues the evaporation of the easy-going New Zealand he knew – “It is a difficult question as to whether internationalism necessarily brings greater happiness.”
To those who question the ‘relevance’ of medieval manuscripts to today’s country (the Māori did not even have writing), he points out that most New Zealanders have some European ancestry. He sees the fifteenth-century Maude Roll in Christchurch [a fanciful genealogy of England’s monarchs] and Māori sagas of migration as “similar expressions of a fundamental need for tales of origin and infinite ancestry.” One Māori clan helped digitalize some medieval documents, shaming the angst of too many European-descended scholars. One book of hours bears a nineteenth century inscription in Māori to the first Catholic Bishop of the country – one of the earliest written specimens of the language. “Here, “he says, “is the earliest statement of modern New Zealand summed up as Anglican as well as Catholic, English and French, Latin and Greek, European and Māori, one nation under God, from the colony’s very beginning, in a medieval Book of Hours.”
Is this ‘protesting too much’? It is not only multiculturalism that calls old culture into question, but also irreligion and the retreat of learning. Yet whatever the blank pages of the future may hold, one thing is certain – the author has done a signal service to the land of the long white cloud, writing this most distant domain into the mainstream of history.
This review first appeared in Engelsberg Ideas, and is republished with permission. The original article is here – The enchanting world of medieval manuscripts – Engelsberg ideas