Christopher de Hamel is probably the best-known historian of medieval manuscripts in the world. He has worked for Sotheby’s, Cambridge University, and written numerous award-winning books. However, it all began here in New Zealand, where de Hamel first encountered medieval manuscripts as a 1960s Dunedin schoolboy, followed by the libraries of Auckland and Wellington. What he found there changed his life.

The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts recaptures that first thrill of childhood discovery, and traces his family’s migration to New Zealand, and the journeys of illuminated manuscripts to libraries as far from their birthplaces in Europe as it is possible to travel.

Sixty years later, he returns to where he first discovered medieval Europe in New Zealand and gives a richly illustrated lecture on both his, and the manuscripts’, remarkable journeys.