The Manila Manuscript

On September 27, 1940, yet another of the series of German air raids of the Blitz hit London. Twenty-two incendiary bombs struck one of the most important private English collections, the Holland Library. Not all its books were destroyed in the blaze: this article tells the story of a manuscript that escaped unscathed and of Charles Boxer, the impassioned bibliophile who had seen it before the raid, purchased it years later, and loved it with a scholar’s devotion. Colonel Boxer is well known to us: in 1984 we published, in our series “The Signs of Man,” an essay he wrote on another illustrated sixteenth-century manuscript, the Codex Casanatense 1889, dedicated to the Portuguese conquests in the Indies. Sixteen years later, in the year 2000, Charles Boxer passed away. But the pages of books and magazines – which also from time to timesurvive the ravages of fire – outlive us, and in this issue we are delighted to welcome back an old friend and the splendid Codex that bears his name to the pages of FMR.