Recent Books

Abstract

The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket. By Christopher de Hamel. [London]: Allen Lane. 2020. 58 pp. £9.99. isbn 978 0 241 46958 3. More than forty years ago Christopher de Hamel addressed the Bibliographical Society on the subject of Thomas Becket's books, and he returns to this theme in a little book published on the 850th anniversary of Becket's martyrdom. The list of ‘libri sancti thome’ in the fourteenth-century library catalogue of Christ Church Canterbury provides plentiful evidence of the breadth of Becket's learning, but makes no mention of an Anglo-Saxon Psalter, now MS 411 in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which is described in a note on its front flyleaf in an Elizabethan hand as having belonged to Thomas Becket and formerly having a jewelled silver binding. All earlier scholars have considered this attribution spurious, but de Hamel made news headlines in 2016 by connecting this inscription with a virtually identical description in the sacrist's inventory found in the very same manuscript as the Christ Church Library Catalogue. In a characteristically ingenious series of steps, we are told how the Psalter, originally written probably for Archbishop ^lfric around 1000, would have been inherited by Alphege, Becket's only precursor as a martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket held Alphege in particular regard, and two of the narratives of his martyrdom report that his last words were to commend his soul to the care of St Alphege. It is an appealing thought that Becket may have treasured this book throughout his final years, though a leap of faith might be required to follow de Hamel's romantic notion that ‘he probably took it to bed’ and may have gathered up this book from his bedchamber en route to his execution, giving it the status of a secondary relic. But the story is so well told as to be undis- provable, and a welcome exploration of the wider status which a book could hold in the Middle Ages.