Christopher de Hamel on The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts

Join us to celebrate the new memoir from author of _Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts,_ Christopher De Hamel!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 realization that they too are migrants far from home._The Migrants_ explores the immense journeys of books and people.

It is a tale of colonization 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.

Today, the author takes us 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._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 lives in London._