Ross King: The Bookseller of Florence (2021)•
Melanie King: Ross King (1962- )Ross King: The Bookseller of Florence (2021)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 3/12/24]:
Ross King. The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. Chatto & Windus. London: Penguin Random House UK., 2021.
At the back of his latest book The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club (2022), Christopher de Hamel has included the following note:
I must recount every author's nightmare. After this chapter and its notes were entirely finished, a publisher wrote to ask whether I would care to read and perhaps endorse an exciting new book by Ross King, whom I confess I had not heard of, The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance, London, 2021. I envisaged my entire chapter as superseded and to be abandoned. I seized the book with nail-biting anxiety. Extraordinarily, we hardly overlap. His is a wide-ranging survey of the cultural Renaissance, culled in part from Vespasiano's biographical memoirs. There is very little on manuscript production as such (more on early printing) and much of that is non-specific, and nothing changed my text. I greet Mr King genially as a fellow tourist in the Via dei Librai but our shopping bags are different. [521-22]Who would have thought that the field of manuscript studies was such eagerly contested ground? I, too, felt a slight sense of familiarity about the name Vespasiano da Bisticci when I ran into a secondhand copy of The Bookseller of Florence in a vintage shop the other day.
Having recently read The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club, I knew that one of the twelve members of de Hamel's "club" was a Florentine bookseller - and the dates of the two books did seem to mesh very closely. I wasn't expecting to find anything quite so circumstantial about the coincidence of timing in his Bibliography & Notes section, however.
De Hamel is, it must be admitted, rather fond of adding a touch of Hitchcockian suspense to his accounts of adventures along the bookshelf. For myself, I'm just glad to have copies of both books, his and King's.
Perhaps it's this flair for the dramatic which accounts for the runaway success of de Hamel's bestselling Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016). It's not, in itself, one would have thought, an immediate shoo-in for such extraordinary popular - as well as critical - acclaim. As he himelf has said of the response to the book:
"One of the books I’ve written had a print run of 500 copies or so. This book sold in the hundreds of thousands."This comment comes from Matthew Littlewood's article "Medieval manuscripts ‘most amazing things’," in the Otago Daily Times (17/8/23). It's possibly of interest only to other New Zealanders, but the fact that de Hamel moved here at a young age, and attended King’s High School and then the University of Otago seems to have slipped out of some of his more recent biographical summaries. Not only that; also the detail that:
It was in Dunedin as a teenager he discovered his love of medieval manuscripts, frequently visiting the Dunedin Public Library and poring over them.Littlewood's article concludes with the following Easter egg for fans:
"I just thought they were the most amazing things," Dr de Hamel said.
"They really spoke to me.
"They bring you in contact with art, and life, of centuries ago.
"I have the same reaction to them that some people get from meeting famous people they admire."
He planned to write a book on medieval manuscript collections in New Zealand, Dr de Hamel said.
He said for "diversity", Dunedin had the best collection in the country.
"It’s remarkable because this is the furthest away part of the world where they exist."
As for de Hamel's "fellow shopper" - or fellow manuscript-hunter - on the Via dei Librai, Ross King, I guess I have quite a number of reasons for regarding him with sympathy.
For a start, like me, he was born in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also, we share a name: "Ross" (first name for him, surname for me). Also, he shares a surname with my favourite author, Stephen King. Also, he's Canadian by birth, so understands the psychological complexities of growing up in a country overshadowed culturally by a brash neighbour (the United States for him, Australia for us). Also, he has a PhD in English Literature from York University in Toronto, whereas I have a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh.
What else? He's a bestselling, prizewinning writer of nonfiction, whereas I'm an obscure poet and fiction-writer who indulges himself writing blogposts about his own book collection. Snap!
Joking apart, after making a bit of a false start as a novelist - though Ex-Libris (1998), set in London and Prague, which "chronicles how a London bookseller's search in the 1660s for a missing manuscript leads him unwittingly into a world of deception and murder" sounds well worth a look - King shifted to non-fiction because "I’m not interested in making things up".
Since then he's covered a remarkable number of themes and eras, ranging from Italian Renaissance artists and politicians (Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Michelangelo) to early twentieth century Canadian (the 'Group of Seven') and French painters (Monet and the other Impressionists). Between them they've racked up a remarkable number of prizes and award nominations.
And what is his writing like? I'd say, overall, that it was distinguished by a love of piquant and picturesque detail. Here are a few examples from The Bookseller of Florence:
This “miraculous man” — Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg — was nearing sixty years of age. He had been born in Mainz, a town on the banks of the Rhine River with a population of six thousand, sometime in the mid- to late 1390s. Little is known about his early life, or, for that matter, about his middle or later years either. He moved 110 miles upstream along the Rhine to Strasbourg sometime around the late 1420s, probably as an exile following municipal disorders in Mainz that pitted the middle-class guildsmen against the upper class, to which Gutenberg’s family belonged. A good deal of what is known about him comes from his various legal scrapes. In the first of these, in 1437, he was sued for a breach of his promise to marry a woman named Ennelin zu der Yserin Tür (Ennelin of the Iron Gate); he was also sued for defamation by one of her witnesses, a shoemaker whom Gutenberg called “a miserable wretch who lived by lying and cheating.” Gutenberg was forced to pay the shoemaker compensation for the slander but appears to have avoided marriage to Ennelin. By this time he was a member of Strasbourg’s guild of goldsmiths, supporting himself by polishing gemstones and, together with a partner named Hans Riffe, manufacturing pilgrims’ mirrors in anticipation of the crowds coming to view the famous and sacred relics exposed every seven years at Aachen, such as the swaddling clothes of Jesus and the robe of the Virgin. These mirrors were used by pilgrims according to the religious practice of the day, capturing and “retaining” the divine reflection of these holy relics, after which they were proudly worn on the return journey as badges.Wow! That's a lot more than I ever knew before about the founder of European printing, Johannes Gutenberg. Maybe more than I actually needed to know, in fact, but it's still, undoubtedly, arresting and memorable. As W. H. Auden once asked his BBC listeners:
Who would rather learn the facts of Augustus' imperial policy than discover that he had spots on his stomach? No one.Here are a few details about Vespasiano da Bisticci himself:
The map of Florence, a bird’s-eye view from the north, shows the city embraced by a diamond-shaped circuit of walls and split in half by the River Arno, spanned by its four bridges. Many of Florence’s churches and various other monuments are shown inside the walls, all identified by inscriptions helpfully added by a scribe in reddish ink. The artist, Piero del Massaio, even included the copper ball that in 1471 Andrea del Verrocchio added to the lantern at the top of Brunelleschi’s dome. The map also shows, on the south side of the Arno, between the Ponte Rubaconte and the Ponte Vecchio, a handsome private home. The reddish ink clearly identifies the occupant: Domus Vespasiani — the house, that is, of Vespasiano. The inclusion of Vespasiano’s home in Via de’ Bardi indicates his friendship with Duke Alfonso, who must have appreciated this little in-joke, and who may have been a visitor to Vespasiano’s house during his stay in Florence. It also gives proof of Vespasiano’s eminence: his house, like that of Niccolò Niccoli many years earlier, had become one of the sights of Florence.You begin to get the idea. Ross King writes like an immensely enthusiastic tour-guide, for whom every detail of the passing scene has a tale to tell.
It can become a little wearisome at times, but the careful arrangement of his chapters allows you take a breath between each deep dive into the teeming world of the early Renaissance.
Christopher de Hamel. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World. Allen Lane. London: Penguin, 2016.
- The Gospels of Saint Augustine (Cambridge): late 6th century
- The Codex Amiatinus (Florence): c. 700
- The Book of Kells (Dublin): late 8th century
- The Leiden Aratea (Leiden): early 9th century
- The Morgan Beatus (New York): mid-10th century
- Hugo Pictor (Oxford): late 11th century
- The Copenhagen Psalter (Copenhagen): third quarter of the 12th century
- The Carmina Burana (Munich): first half of the 13th century
- The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre (Paris): second quarter of the 14th century
- The Hengwrt Chaucer (Aberystwyth): c. 1400
- The Visconti Semideus (St Petersburg): c. 1438
- The Spinola Hours (Los Angeles): c. 1515-20
Christopher de Hamel, by contrast, is the master of the scholarly in-joke. Who, for instance, is familiar nowadays with Gurdjieff's once ubiquitous hippie classic Meetings with Remarkable Men? So why make a reference to it in the title to your book about twelve representative medieval manuscripts, neatly arranged in chronological order?
G. I. Gurdjieff. Meetings with Remarkable Men. All and Everything: Second Series. Trans. A R. Orage et al. 1963. London: Picador, 1978.
Because it amuses him - that's why. But also because it takes away some of the air of portentous solemnity such an enterprise might otherwise imply. 'What a droll fellow', one is encouraged to think - rather than the more obvious 'what a stiff' ...
In this he resembles that other great British pundit Irving Finkel, author of The Ark Before Noah, with his flowing white beard and avuncular manner: like a scholarly Santa Claus.
Christopher de Hamel. The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. Allen Lane. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2022.
- The Monk: Saint Anselm (c. 1033-1109): Normandy
- The Prince: The Duc de Berry (1340-1416): France
- The Bookseller: Vespasiano da Bisticci (c. 1422-1498): Florence
- The Illuminator: Simon Bening (c. 1484-1561): Bruges
- The Antiquary: Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631): London
- The Rabbi: David Oppenheim (1664-1736): Prague
- The Savant: Jean-Joseph Rive (1730-1791): Paris
- The Librarian: Sir Frederic Madden (1801-1873): British Museum, London
- The Forger: Constantine Simonides (c. 1824-c. 1890): Hydra, Greece
- The Editor: Theodore Mommsen (1817-1903): Berlin
- The Collector: Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962): Brighton, England
- The Curator: Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950): New York
Charles Dickens. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. 1836-37. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Penguin English Library. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
I suspect that it might have been his publishers who encouraged de Hamel to think that lightning could strike twice if only he reproduced almost exactly the structure and subject-matter of his earlier book.
The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club may not be quite so charming as the first instalment of his memoirs of rummaging among manuscripts, but it's pretty close. In fact, in many ways it's even more informative, and definitely more wide-ranging.
Did it sell as well? I somehow doubt it, but who cares? Compared to the minuscule sales of the earlier works de Hamel laboured over so thanklessly, it presumably paid its way - and it's at least as attractive a prize for manuscript-fanciers generally.
I'm certainly looking forward to his book on medieval manuscript collections in New Zealand!
Leo Deuel. Testaments of Time: The Search for Lost Manuscripts and Records. 1965. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1966.
As for the subject of manuscript hunting in general, it can seem, at times, almost an over-stocked field. Leo Deuel's 1965 book Testaments of Time, for instance, tried to do for manuscripts what popular authors such as ex-Nazi propagandist C. W. Ceram and British straight arrow Leonard Cottrell had already done for more conventional archaeology.
Unfortunately Deuel's gleeful recounting of the various ways in which libraries and monasteries had been tricked out of their bibliographical treasures by unscrupulous Western scholars and adventurers makes rather unfortunate reading now.
Whatever the rights and wrongs in each case - and the emphasis on how damp and unhygienic were the conditions from which these manuscripts were "saved" has become one of the most distinctive clichés of the genre - the fact remains that many of these "rescued" artefacts and books ended up being incinerated in one or other of Europe's World Wars: an unpleasant irony; if that's all it is.
Another rather more perceptive and interesting title in this vein is Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. His book came on the very cusp of change to the customary attitudes in these matters. Hopkirk can see the barbarity and greed of the European collectors who plundered the treasures of Dun-Huang and the other "lost cities" of Central Asia, but he's also happy that so much which might otherwise have been gone forever was thus preserved.
And, to be honest, one can't have it both ways. Either you resign yourself to the gradual decay and destruction of much of mankind's cultural legacy - or you try to freeze-dry it all in the basements of museums. Either position, taken to extremes, is absurd. Perhaps the best one can say is that the right manuscript, found at the right time, can ignite a new understanding of a whole era.
David Diringer. The Book before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental. [as ‘The Hand-Produced Book’, 1953]. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1982.
Diringer's work, both more descriptive and more scholarly in its methodology, is much less liable to attack in this respect than Deuel's unabashed celebration of his "Conquistadors without Swords."
Irene Vallejo. Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. ['El infinito en un junco: La invención de los libros en el mundo antiguo', 2019]. Trans. Charlotte Whittle. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2022.For a rather more jazzed-up version of much the same story, you could try Irene Vallejo's spirited new book Papyrus [though the Spanish title - "Infinity in a reed" - seems to me far more imaginative than the rather bald English translation].
And then there's the vexed question of precisely what kinds of libraries were used to store these rather awkwardly shaped artefacts: tubular papyrus scrolls and box-like early codexes.
Luciano Canfora. The Vanished Library. 1987. Trans. Martin Ryle. 1989. Hutchinson Radius. London: Random Century Group, 1990.
Luciano Canfora's brilliantly speculative reconstruction of the fragments of information which have come down to us about the greatest of all ancient manuscript repositories, the Library of Alexandria, is still well worth reading almost four decades years after it was first published.
Nor is Canfora himself content to stay immured within the walls of his own university library. Like so many Italian Academics, he takes very seriously the role of the intellectual to tell truth to power:
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has sued Luciano Canfora, an eighty-one-year-old historian, philologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Bari, for aggravated defamation (diffamazione aggravata). The preliminary hearing took place yesterday.I'm glad to report that, since the appearance of the open letter above, Giorgia Meloni has dropped her suit, three days before the case was due to go to trial, on the 7th of October, 2024. Perhaps she could see that baiting a frail old scholar in open court was unlikely to be a winning strategy politically.
The case dates back two years, to when Meloni was an opposition parliamentarian and the leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party. Professor Canfora is the acclaimed author of dozens of books and a famous public figure. Invited to speak at a local high school as part of a discussion of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he made the following comment about Meloni’s position on the political spectrum:Even the very terrible and always reviled, poor thing, leader of that right-wing party called Fratelli d’Italia (as if in France there was a political party called La Marseillaise) — who is usually treated as a lunatic, very dangerous, etc., because being a neo-Nazi in her soul, she immediately sided with the Ukrainian neo-Nazis [he later clarified he was referring to the far-right Azov Brigade] — has become a very important stateswoman and is more than happy of course in that role. She is not part of the current majority but is a very convenient external pawn to show that the country is united.Meloni immediately protested that she would sue Professor Canfora for defamation — above all for having called her a “neo-Nazi,” which according to the complaint “is apt to distort and falsify her political identity.” On July 5, 2022, she did. Having become Italy’s prime minister that October, she did not withdraw her complaint, which makes this trial an unprecedented event in Western Europe’s democratic history: it is the first time that a serving prime minister has dragged a scholar to court.- Pierre Vesperini: An Open Letter in Support of Luciano Canfora
The New York Review (17/4/24)
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Bibliography:
- Geoffrey Chaucer – Prologue to the Canterbury Tales – A Hitherto Unrecorded Variant Reading (1980)
- A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986)
- Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns and Their Peregrinations After the Reformation (1991)
- Scribes and Illuminators (1992)
- The Book: A History of the Bible (2001)
- The Rothschilds and Their Collections of Illuminated Manuscripts (2005)
- [with Patricia Lovett] The Macclesfield Alphabet Book: A Facsimile (2010)
- Gilding the Lilly: A Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library (2010)
- Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016)
- Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World. Allen Lane. London: Penguin, 2016.
- Making Medieval Manuscripts (2018)
- The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket (2020)
- The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club (2022)
- The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. Allen Lane. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2022.
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Fiction:
- Domino (1995)
- Ex-Libris (1998)
- Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence (2000)
- Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (2002)
- The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006)
- Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power (2007)
- Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (2010)
- Leonardo and the Last Supper (2011)
- Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (2016)
- The Bookseller of Florence (2021)
- The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. Chatto & Windus. London: Penguin Random House UK., 2021.
- The Shortest History of Italy (2024)
Non-fiction:
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- category - Literature, Language & Philosophy: Literature & Philosophy
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