Those crafty medieval monks — forging their way through history!

A new book claims that England’s Gospels of St Augustine and Ireland’s Book of Kells, among other famous medieval manuscripts, are fakes

Turning the diverting pages of M J Harper’s Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (Urquhart Press, £12.95, June 2017) is a meeting with a remarkable book.

The first thing the prospective reader needs to know is that it is an excoriating riposte to Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (September 2016), a much-lauded and best-selling book about 12 famous medieval illuminated manuscripts, described by its publisher Penguin as ‘the most beguiling history book of the year’.

Since 2000, de Hamel has been Fellow and Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Parker Library, which is in his care and includes many of the earliest manuscripts in English language and history. In the course of a long career at Sotheby’s, de Hamel is said to have ‘probably handled and catalogued more illuminated manuscripts and over a wider range than any person alive’.

However, although revisionist historian Mick Harper might find de Hamel’s book beguiling, it is not in the way that Penguin would have intended.

Harper’s response is not to be charmed or enchanted but, rather, under the other…