Abstract

The steady stream of books on medieval manuscripts addressed to a popular audience over the past two decades coincides with the advent of tablets such as Amazon's Kindle. As the flatlands of the digital realm encompass more of life, nostalgia for a tactile realm of reading, whether in the making or the perception of artifacts, asserts itself, as does the desire to immerse oneself in the real space of the conventional book, as opposed to the virtual yet denatured spaces of the metaverse. No accident, then, that, following an introduction that gestures toward medieval subjects and to readers other than Christian, Wellesley's engaging, if episodic, account of medieval manuscripts (published in the United States by Basic Books as The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts) opens with a prologue in which she recounts her hands-on visit to a parchment maker, during which she tried to slough the hair off a hide using an implement known as a scudder.Manuscripts permit one to come into contact with the past, or at least to harbor the illusion that one can. Wellesley's book repeatedly evokes the contingency of landmarks and masterworks that make up the history of culture. Pendant chapters treat “Discoveries,” medieval as well as modern, of books that, when first encountered, had been lost to view for the better part of a millennium, as well as the “Near-Disasters” by which famous works such as Beowulf (or indeed entire libraries) made it down to modernity by only a hair's breadth—despite the devil's assurance in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita that “manuscripts don't burn.” Within a binding held tight by clasps, parchment—even when exposed to fire—can survive, if it is not then reduced to a mess by the water used to douse the flames. Having been rescued from the ruins of Ashburnham House, which burned in 1731, the detached pages of the Cotton Genesis at the British Library—one of a handful of illustrated biblical manuscripts from late antiquity—now look like soggy, burned toast pressed between glass sheets to conserve what little is left.Other chapters in this book make things personal, matching brief biographies of celebrated manuscripts with famous (or not so famous) persons, whether patrons, scribes, or artists—a sequence that reflects their order of importance in the Middle Ages. To have included an afterword as well as an epilogue seems indulgent: one, too brief, on the impact of printing (focused on the English printer Caxton), the other on “The Use and Misuse of the Past,” which dwells on the dispersal of monastic libraries after the English Reformation. The focus on the British Isles, to the neglect of the continent, risks being too narrow for a book so general in scope. The book's very British flavor, however, is also part of what lends it a familiar, chatty tone. A pleasant, companionable read, this extended essay does not advance our knowledge of medieval manuscripts, but it does help diffuse it to a larger audience in a way that makes old books seem companionable. Rather than Hidden Hands, the book might well have been called Comites latentes: hidden friends.