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The Migrants
A Memoir with Manuscripts
Brief Description
A brilliant memoir of adolescence in New Zealand and of the migration of European manuscripts to the far side of the world. Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of...
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The Migrants
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Description
A brilliant memoir of adolescence in New Zealand and of the migration of European manuscripts to the far side of the world.
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realisation that they too are migrants far from home.
The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonisation and the migration of culture - of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters - bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius, and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842.
We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth.
This is a coming-of-age saga with extraordinary twists, crossing many hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles, recounted with passion, humour, and a lifetime's reflection.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780241670125
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 09 April 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Allen Lane
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 28.0mm
Width: 156.0mm
Height: 240.0mm
Weight: 500g
Pages: 304
Collections
About the Author
In the course of a long career at Sotheby's and at Cambridge University, Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive and his delight and enthusiasm in them run through all he writes. His many books, translated into numerous languages, include A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize), The Book in the Cathedral- The Last Relic of Thomas Becket and The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He lives in London.
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