Christopher de Hamel

Christopher de Hamel FSA FRHistS is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library. He is one of the world’s leading experts on mediaeval manuscripts. His book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is the winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for 2016 and the Wolfson History Prize for 2017.

De Hamel was born in England, but at the age of four moved with his parents to New Zealand, where he was schooled and attended university.

He was subsequently awarded a DPhil by Oxford University for his thesis on 12th-century Bible commentaries. De Hamel also holds a PhD from Cambridge University, as well as honorary Doctors of Letters from the University of Otago and from St. John’s University, Minnesota.

Between 1975 and 2000 de Hamel worked for Sotheby’s in its Western Manuscripts Department. He was elected as the Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 2000, and elected a member of the Roxburghe Club the following year. In 2009, he delivered the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of "Fragments in Book Bindings".

De Hamel has written a number of historical works within his field of expertise:

• 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)
• 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)