
The Migrants
A Memoir with Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel(Author)
Allen Lane (Publisher)
Published on 9. April 2026
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-241-67012-5 (ISBN)
Description
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. We travel with the author today 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.
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. We travel with the author today 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 36 mm
Weight
558 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-67012-5 (9780241670125)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2026
Penguin
€14.99
Available for download
Person
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 is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He lives in London.