Medieval manuscripts for sale uk series#

The result is an unexpectedly swift page-turner on the era when pages were turned slowly.

Their creators being largely anonymous, Medieval manuscripts tell their own stories in this Decameron of devotion and obsession, encryption and skullduggery, extravagance, destruction, and survival. Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian. Wellesley draws on her deep scholarly knowledge of medieval manuscripts to weave a captivating tale, told through generations of 'tremulous hands' and forgotten artistic geniuses, whose works inform so much of what we know today about the Middle Ages. Mary Wellesley has taken jewels from our bibliographic treasures and placed them, carefully and with love, in the palm of the reader's hand - Ian Mortimer Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and Hidden Hands is as good as historical writing gets.

Medieval manuscripts for sale uk series#

It isn't just an introduction to literary manuscripts but also a series of glimpses of the extraordinary diversity of medieval lives. This is an engaging and beautiful book - the engagement arising from the author's deep commitment to understanding the lives of medieval women and men, and the beauty from her ability to make us see and hear them talking about and living their experiences. With an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history. Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed.ДЇrom the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects. Hidden Hands tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded.