Dr Christopher de Hamel is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and is Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library, one of the most important small collections of early manuscripts in Britain. For 25 years from 1975 he was responsible for all sales of medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s . He has doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge and honorary doctorates from St John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, and Otago University, New Zealand.
He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Comité international de paléographie. He is author of numerous books on illuminated manuscripts and book collecting, including Glossed Books of the Bible (1984), The Book, A History of the Bible (2001), and Bibles, An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print (2011). He was recipient of a festschrift in 2010, The Medieval Book, Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel (ed. J. H. Marrow, R. A. Linenthal and W. Noel).
Books in order of publication:
Geoffrey Chaucer – Prologue to the Canterbury Tales – A Hitherto Unrecorded Variant Reading”, Privately Printed, 1980
A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Phaidon, 1986; second revised edition, 1994)
Syon Abbey, The library of the Bridgettine Nuns and their Peregrinations after the Reformation (Roxburghe Club, 1991)
Scribes and Illuminators (British Museum, 1992)
The Book: a History of the Bible (Phaidon, 2001)
The Rothschilds and their Collections of Illuminated Manuscripts (British Library, 2005)
The Macclesfield Alphabet Book: a facsimile (2010) with Patricia Lovett
Gilding the Lilly: a Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library (Lilly Library, Indiana University, 2010)
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (Allen Lane, 2016)
Making Medieval Manuscripts (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2018)
The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club (Allen Lane, 2022)
Oak Lawn Library Friends 