OPIS

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. It isn't just an introduction to literary manuscripts but also a series of glimpses of the extraordinary diversity of medieval lives. 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. 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. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian. Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars. 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. The result is an unexpectedly swift page-turner on the era when pages were turned slowly. Eliot Weinberger, author of Angels & Saints Hidden Hands shines with 'bibliophilic feeling.' With care forensic and literary, Wellesley reveals the traces of their history legible in the pores of the page and in the process provides a page-turner of her own. Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book Mary Wellesley has written a most original book which is at once a vivid personal account of scholarly detective work and a model of how history might be taught now that there is easy electronic access to ancient manuscripts. She traces the precarious survival of the the earliest books, expounds with clarity the methods and purposes of authors, scribes, patrons, annotators and illustrators and speculates with sympathy on their motives. Hands (especially female ones) assume personalities, indeed voices which are recognisable even when alien - and often urgently appealing. Nicholas Penny

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