Book Notice: Christopher de Hamel’s The Book in the Cathedral by Maurice Billingsley

Becket and a Book

Maurice Billingsley

The Book in the Cathedral by Christopher De Hamel; Penguin UK, 2020; ISBN 10: 0241469589 / ISBN 13: 9780241469583

Those who have read Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts will attest that he is a delightful and informative guide to mediaeval thought and culture. This little book was produced for the now postponed 850th anniversary celebrations of the Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, who was born in 1120, murdered in 1170, and his remains translated into a new shrine in 1220. It is not a potboiler, however, but a work of scholarly detection and a good read. It would be a perfect stocking-filler for anyone with more than a passing interest in Becket, Canterbury or medieval art.

De Hamel loves manuscripts and tracking and tracing those who produced and owned them, with all their personal foibles, not to mention the scholars who study and care for them today. He brings a storyteller’s art to an historical detective mystery, which includes two sainted martyrs and other archbishops of Canterbury, artists and scholars in AngloSaxon England and mediæval France – the Æ symbol is one of the clues – but I’ll spare the spoilers, except to pose the question, why is Thomas shown so often with book in hand, when he was not a writer like Dunstan or Anselm?

Not all will be revealed, for Becket remains an enigma; was he a holy man, was he a scholar? Much of what remains of his library is in Cambridge, including manuscripts that de Hamel cared for. Of one he says: ’I suspect that I handled it more often than Becket did. I used to show it to classes of students sometimes, and remarkably often one would furtively reach out a finger to touch the edge of a page, evidence that a sense of momentary encounter with Thomas Becket still carries a secret thrill’ (p17). Yet for the medieval monks, books were books, whosoever had owned them; they were not so personal as a lock of hair or a scrap of clothing. My own ’reach out a finger’ moment came on a Cathedral Open Evening at Canterbury. Two ladies had a dish filled with sweepings of iron from the floor of a Saxon smithy in the precincts, from the time of St Dunstan, metal worker and one of the greatest of our Archbishops. Could it be metal he had worked? But that's another tale.

This little book should be bought in a touchable form, not as an e-book. It is well presented and cloth-bound in martyr’s red, another witness to the fascination of history and eminently readable. Christopher de Hamel is an Academic Librarian and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.