Christopher Francis Rivers de Hamel FSA FRHistS (born 20 November 1950) is a British academic librarian and expert on mediaeval manuscripts. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library. His book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is the winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for 2016 and the Wolfson History Prize for 2017.
Christopher de Hamel was born on 20 November 1950 in London, England. [1] At the age of four he moved with his parents to New Zealand, where he was educated at King's High School, Dunedin, and graduated with an honours degree in history from the University of Otago. [2] [3]
He was subsequently awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree by Oxford University [4] for his research on 12th-century Bible commentaries. [5] His thesis was titled "The production and circulation of glossed books of the Bible in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries". [6] He has been awarded honorary Doctorates of Letters from the University of Otago [3] and from St. John’s University, Minnesota.
Between 1975 and 2000 de Hamel worked for Sotheby’s in its Western Manuscripts Department. [7] He was elected as the Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 2000, [3] and elected a member of the Roxburghe Club the following year. [8] De Hamel delivered the 2009 Lyell Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of "Fragments in Book Bindings". [9] In 2017, his then-newly-published Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, and won both the £40,000 Wolfson History Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. [10]
De Hamel has formed a collection of manuscripts, the Christopher de Hamel Collection, located in Cambridge, England.
De Hamel has written a number of historical works within his field of expertise: [11]
An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers and liturgical books such as psalters and courtly literature, the practice continued into secular texts from the 13th century onward and typically include proclamations, enrolled bills, laws, charters, inventories, and deeds.
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. From the late 14th century to the early 19th century it was also commonly known as St Benet's College.
Middle English Bible translations (1066-1500) covers the age of Middle English, beginning with the Norman conquest and ending about 1500.
The Codex Amiatinus is considered the best-preserved manuscript of the Latin Vulgate version of the Christian Bible. It was produced around 700 in the northeast of England, at the Benedictine Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey in the Kingdom of Northumbria, now South Tyneside, and taken to Italy as a gift for Pope Gregory II in 716. It was one of three giant single-volume Bibles then made at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, and is the earliest complete one-volume Latin Bible to survive, only the León palimpsest being older. It is the oldest Bible where all the biblical canon present what would be their Vulgate texts.
The St Augustine Gospels is an illuminated Gospel Book which dates from the 6th century and has been in the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 1575. It was made in Italy and has been in England since fairly soon after its creation; by the 16th century it had probably already been at Canterbury for almost a thousand years. It has 265 leaves measuring about 252 x 196 mm, and is not entirely complete, in particular missing pages with miniatures.
Richard Ovenden is a British librarian and author. He currently serves as the 25th Bodley's Librarian in the University of Oxford, having been appointed in 2014. Ovenden also serves as the Director of the Bodleian Library's Centre for the Study of the Book and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College. Ovenden is a trustee of the Chawton House Library and vice-chair of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. In 2009, he was elected third chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition, succeeding Ronald Milne and Dame Lynne Brindley in a post he held until 2013. and returning in 2015 to the honorary position of President of the DPC. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, having been elected in 2008.
The Parker Library is a library within Corpus Christi College, Cambridge which contains rare books and manuscripts. It is known throughout the world due to its invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the majority of which were bequeathed to the college by Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, a former Master of Corpus Christi College.
The British Library is a research library in London that is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The Lambeth Bible is a 12th-century illuminated manuscript, among the finest surviving giant Bibles from Romanesque England. It exists in two volumes; the first is in Lambeth Palace Library and covers Genesis to Job on 328 leaves of vellum measuring circa 520 x 355 mm; the second incomplete volume is in the Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery.
Janet Moira Backhouse was an English manuscripts curator at the British Museum, and a leading authority in the field of illuminated manuscripts.
Jonathan James Graham Alexander, FBA, known in print as J. J. G. Alexander, is a medievalist and expert on manuscripts, "one of the most profound and wide-ranging of all historians of illuminated manuscripts".
The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by "eminent scholars of the book" and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi. They are considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series alongside the Sandars Lectures at the University of Cambridge and the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is an annual lecture series given at Cambridge University. Instituted in 1895 at the behest of Mr Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837–1894), who left a £2000 bequest to the University, the series has continued down to the present day. Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series.
The Lyell Readership in Bibliography is an endowed annual lecture series given at the University of Oxford. Instituted in 1952 by a bequest from the solicitor, book collector and bibliographer James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell (1871–1948), the series has continued down to the present day. Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Sandars Lectures at Cambridge University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series.
Kathleen L. Scott is a codicologist specialising in 15th-century English manuscripts. An independent scholar, she is associated with the University of Massachusetts.
The Simon master was a manuscript illuminator who lived in 12th-century Paris and later moved to St Albans during the time of Simon (1167–1183), Abbot of St Albans, after whom he is named by art historians.
Sir George Frederic Warner, FBA, FSA was an English archivist; he was Keeper of Manuscripts and Egerton Librarian at the British Museum from 1904 to 1911.
Helen Dale Moore is a British literary scholar, who specialises in medieval and early modern literature. Since 2018, she has served as the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She is the first woman to hold that position in the college's 500-year history. She is also an associate professor in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. In 2021, she received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for Amadis in English: A Study in the Reading of Romance as one of the co-winners.
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World is a 2017 book by historian Christopher de Hamel that explores the European medieval world through an in-depth study of 12 illuminated manuscripts. It won the Wolfson History Prize in 2017.
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