-- JoAnn Turner
Someone was asking recently what the Book of Kells was, exactly. I have here before me my own copy of a book entirely devoted to this work.
The Book of Kells is, as someone mentioned, now residing in Trinity College in Dublin. It is a copy of the Gospels, and also contains a number of other sections, including Canon Tables, which give references to compare one section of the Gospels with another, Breves Causae or summaries of each Gospel, Argumentum, or details about the four Evangelists, and various glosses of the text. It is not a complete Bible. Bibles are relatively rare in early medieval manuscripts, where Gospels are relatively common.
The specific origins of the Book of Kells are not precisely known. They are comparable to a number of other manuscripts of similar time and production, namely the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels (I've seen these with my own eyes. I can die happy now!), the Echternach Gospels, the Durham Gospels, the Lichfield Gospels, and the Book of Armagh. Some sections of the Book of Kells seem to have been copied directly from the Book of Durrow, according to my book, but certain details have been left out, rendering the later copy useless. It appears that the Book of Kells was not intended to be used as a scholarly reference.
There are a large number of errors in copying the Latin of the text, some of which are identical to mistakes in the Book of Durrow. Others may have been copied from now-unknown works used as sources. A number of scribes worked on the Book of Kells, as several hands can be identified in the script.
The form of Latin used in the Book of Kells is most closely associated with the Irish Church, while the Lindisfarne Gospels uses a type of text more closely linked with Rome. But the overall form of text in the Kells manuscript compares most closely to the Lichfield Gospels, which was probably produced in Wales.
It's known when and where the Lindisfarne Gospels were produced, but for every other manuscript of the early Middle Ages the provenance is much less certain.
The style of illumination used in the Book of Kells is usually referred to as Hiberno-Saxon. The script is often called Insular. It's virtually impossible for most experts to determine whether a given manuscript was produced in Ireland or Northumbria on the basis of style alone, as the links between the monastic houses were so strong during the years these manuscripts were produced, roughly 650 ad to 850 ad. A scribe trained in Ireland might have been working in a scriptorium in Scotland or the North of England, and vice versa.
Irish scribes and illuminators tended to be slightly more flamboyant than Anglo-Saxon scribes, maybe. But that's a gross generalization. But we can't, therefore, use style or personal flourish as a way of determining which monastic house or scriptorium produced a given manuscript. As mentioned above, a monk trained in Ireland might have been working in a scriptorium in Wales or Northumbria. Or a Northumbrian scribe working under the personal guidance of an Irish-trained monk might have loosened up and changed his personal style. And there's the question of individual variation within a culture, as well. There may well have been a goodly share of artistically-inhibited Irish scribes, and flamboyant Saxons.
Even using other factors, such as which text was used, which mistakes were reproduced, techniques of preparing the parchment and ink, book-binding technology, and so forth, it's still not possible to find a definitive answer to the question of when and where, exactly, the Book of Kells was made, and for or by whom.
That said, though, the Book of Kells, and the Lindisfarne Gospels, Book of Durrow, and others, are exquisite products of the scribe's art and craft. The intricacy and perfection of the designs is staggering.
As a brief description, these manuscripts, being Gospels, all have illuminated pages to introduce each Gospel. Some, at least, have pictures of each Evangelist at the beginning of each Gospel. The opening pages of each section of text are always the fanciest, with very large initial letters that are filled with knotwork and fantastic animals. The first line will be slightly smaller, but still large, the next line smaller again, and so on, until the normal size of the text has been reached. Normally, the largest initial letters are in Roman style (what we use as capital letters in print), the next biggest might be in Roman Rustic or in highly stylized Uncial letters (what we often call, mistakenly, "Irish" lettering. But that's another topic in itself), then Half-Uncial, and finally, the text will be in Insular script of some type.
There are also what are called "carpet" pages, which have no lettering and usually no representations of any kind, just a complete page of abstract design, knotwork, spirals, key patterns, and so on. I'm not sure of the exact purpose of these pages, but I would speculate that, since books are made of signatures of a specific number of pages, it might be necessary to include extra pages every so often to make the text fit into the book. Modern books have signatures of sixteen pages, so the entire book has to somehow fit into some multiple of sixteen, which means juggling text, illustrations, and so on, until it all fits. Or leaving a few pages blank at the very end (they're not there for you to make notes on, they're there because the publisher couldn't think of any plausible way of filling them!). By inserting carpet pages at regular intervals, as well as other illustrations, it may have been easier for the monks to make the book fit into the signatures.
That's just my own thoughts on that, not a scholarly viewpoint. But having produced a few newsletters in my time, I know that I'm always thinking in terms of multiples of four. I have to have four, eight, twelve or sixteen pages, or the newsletter either doesn't go out, or goes out with blank spots. I could use a few carpet pages myself once in a while.
The book that I've been using as a reference here is The Book of Kells, selected and Introduced by Peter Brown, librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). There's also a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells, which was over $100 the last time I saw one, so way out of my budget.
One point for those who may have seen illustrations of these works in books or art history classes, and drooled, as I have done. We normally see these pages in whole or in part, and are stunned by their intricacy and near-perfection of detail. But when I saw the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Library, what shocked me was how small it was. It's not much bigger than a piece of standard loose-leaf or typing paper. The Book of Kells is about the same size, 13 1/2 inches by 9 inches (33x24cm). So all of that incredible, mind-boggling workmanship fits into unbelievably tiny spaces.
The thing that struck me as I looked at the manuscripts in the Manuscript Room is that it's obvious to me that most of these scribes MUST have been very near-sighted, many to an extreme degree. Even if they started out with normal sight, they sure didn't end up with 20/20 vision. And odds are that a far-sighted or normally-sighted person wouldn't want to be cramped up all day long doing close work like this. I say this as a very near-sighted person myself, who has often been known to take out her contact lenses AND use a magnifying lens to do close work on calligraphy and illumination. There's no way any normally-sighted adult could do the detailed work you see on these manuscripts. We're talking about complete miniature paintings with several figures, complete down to patterns of fabric on their clothing, that fit into the loop of a capital letter no bigger than two inches high and an inch and a half wide (5x3cm) in total.
Anyway, this being one of my many pet topics, I could go on for hours about this. But that, in a nutshell, is probably far more than you ever wanted to know about the book of Kells.
Copyright (C) 1995; JoAnn Turner
[Included here, with kind permission of JoAnn Turner]
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