Hidden Hands Quotes

“The scale of bibliographic loss during the Reformation is hard to estimate, but it is clear that what survives of England's medieval textual heritage represents a small fraction of medieval books that existed before 1536.
Of the more than six hundred volumes in the medieval catalogue of the Augustinian Friary in York, only five books have survived, while of the three hundred volumes that the bibliophile benefactor Duke Humphrey gave to the University of Oxford, only two survived the Reformation.”
― Mary Wellesley, Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers

“On the final folio he added a coda in the margin - 'I am called Aldred, born {son of] Aelfred; I speak as the distinguished son of a good woman' - and we hear him, centuries on.”
― Mary Wellesley, Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers

“What is magical about the oldest books [is] that they have been handled and mishandled by so many people in their history; they are smudged with human stories.”
― Mary Wellesley, Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers