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The term ‘Insular’ can be taken to refer specifically to the history and culture of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain and Ireland in the period between the retraction of the limes of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century and the advent of Viking raiders and settlers from Scandinavia during the ninth century. One of the major achievements of this era, so often erroneously termed ‘the Dark Ages’, was the construction of a series of successor states in northern Europe, underpinned by the zeal for Christianity of the newly converted and a re-emerging stability of administrative and social structure based upon the effective collaboration of Church and State. Essential to this process was the dissemination and reception of the Word of God, with its emphasis upon the law, social reform and teaching by example. The great Bibles and Gospelbooks made by Insular monks and nuns during this age stand as an enduring monument to their contribution to the transmission of Scripture and to the transition from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

One of the earliest labours of the missionary St Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to Canterbury where he and his followers arrived in 597, was to begin the conversion of the Kentish court and to commit its germanic law-code to the ‘safe-keeping’ of writing, thereby beginning a process of integration of the Church into an existing social and land-owning structure.[i] Augustine’s followers, and those of Irish missionaries such as Columbanus, Columba, Aidan and Fursey, and of Britons such as Patrick, Ninian and Samson, and of Anglo-Saxons such as Cuthbert, Wilfrid, Willibrord, Boniface and his kinswoman, Leoba, spread the processes of conversion and / or reform to the courts and countryside of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, through monastic foundations such as Whithorn, Armagh, Bangor, Durrow, Derry, Iona, Melrose, Lindisfarne, Lichfield, Peterborough, Sherborne, Wimborne, Minster-in-Thanet, Péronne, Luxeuil, St Gall, Bobbio, Dol, Landévennec, Echternach, Utrecht, Tauberbischofsheim and Fulda. At its most radical this inspirational preaching of the Christian message could lead seasoned warriors to embrace pacifism and kings to free slaves. Structure and discipline might be important, but did not preclude compassion and care. The role models provided by such energised, and often personally charismatic and / or ascetic, individuals – publically acclaimed as saints during their own lifetimes – set new levels of social and spiritual aspiration.

Britain first received the Christian teaching under the Roman Empire, perhaps as early as the first century and certainly during the third, when it achieved popularity amongst merchants and the military along with the ‘mystery’ cults of Mithras and Isis. In 306 Constantine, the first emperor to embrace Christianity and to enable its eventual adoption as the state religion, was proclaimed emperor by his troops in York in northern England. By the time those troops officially withdrew, a process formalised by the Honorian Rescript of 410, Britain possessed an organised diocesan structure, was sending bishops to attend major Church councils in Gaul, and had spawned one of the most erudite heresies of the day – Pelagianism (with its emphasis upon free will). Although not absorbed by the Roman Empire, Ireland is now thought not to have been as isolated as it has formerly often been represented. As early as the 430s the Pope dispatched Palladius as bishop to those in southern Ireland who already believed in Christ and later in the century his efforts were extended by the British bishop, Patrick, with a focus within the northern parts of Ireland.

During the fifth century Germanic mercenaries who had served, successively, Rome in Britain and the native Romano-British remnants of its regime began seizing power and land on their own behalf. Despite valiant resistance, which has come to focus over ensuing centuries around assorted tales associated with a Christian leader known as ‘King Arthur’, a series of pagan kingdoms had been carved out by the end of the sixth century by a miscellany of Germanic peoples who have come to be known as the Anglo-Saxons. The contribution and continuity of the British Church during this period is only now beginning to be acknowledged. Wales, Cornwall and parts of Scotland, as well as pockets of native British Christians throughout England, kept the flame of Christianity alive and carried it, on the crest of a wave of migration, to Brittany. Yet the British churches do not appear to have attempted to convert their warlike Germanic neighbours and overlords, indeed, some early Welsh laws expressly prohibit ethnic interaction. The process of conversion fell, during the later sixth and seventh centuries, to representatives of the Roman Church, such as Augustine from Rome, and his follower Paulinus, and Agilbert and Felix from Gaul,[ii] or of the Irish (or, as it is often miscalled, the ‘Celtic’) Church, such as Columba, Aidan, Cuthbert and Fursey.[iii]

The earliest surviving Insular manuscripts containing Scripture are from Ireland and date to the end of the sixth or, more probably, the beginning of the seventh century.[iv] They include the earliest extant Insular Gospelbook, Codex Usserianus Primus, which contains an ‘Old Latin’ text and which is reminiscent, palaeographically and stylistically, of the early Gospelbook from St Columbanus’s Irish foundation at Bobbio (Ambosiana I.61 sup.,  which contains a ‘mixed’ text).[v] Likewise of early date are the Springmount Bog Tablets, a set of wax tablets inscribed with verses from the Psalms.[vi]  These are an unusual survival, given the climatic conditions of northern Europe; they were preserved owing to loss in a peat bog, and they convey graphically the obligation of the priest to be ‘psalteratus’ – to have memorised and be able to recite the Psalms, in the tradition of the Judaic priesthood – and recall exhortations to ordinands to spend whatever time possible learning them, even when travelling (as the person studying these extracts may have been). The famous Cathach of Columcille contains Jerome’s Romanum version of the Psalter and was long thought to be the actual copy made by St Columba (Columcille) of a Psalter owned by St Finian of Moville.[vii] The Cathach is the first Insular book in which decoration begins to assume a significant role in articulating the text, with its decorated initials (their crosses and fish perhaps influenced by manuscripts associated with production in Rome under Pope Gregory the Great, combined with native Celtic ornament) and the diminuendo effect of the following letters linking them to the actual text script. Herein lie the origins of the magnificent full-page illuminated incipits of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

The Cathach is the first in a series of high quality Psalters from an Insular milieu. Others include the Salaberga or Hamilton Psalter and the Morgan, Lothian or Blickling Psalter, both thought to have been made in England during the mid-eighth century, and the Vespasian Psalter.[viii] The latter is a particularly impressive volume, written in a fine uncial script emulating Italian script and decorated with initials and display panels marking the textual divisions of the ‘Three Fifties’ (Psalms 1, 51 and 101) and a liturgical division of the Psalms that serves to commemorate their role in the public prayer life of the Church, as well as forming the mainstay of private devotion. Its imposing miniature depicting King David and his scribes, musicians and dancers shows the psalmist as a contemporary Anglo-Saxon ruler, playing a lyre which corresponds in its detail to one excavated in the famous early seventh-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo. The figure style is reminiscent of Italo-Byzantine forms, whilst the surrounding arcade is decorated with Germanic animal ornament and Celtic spiralwork and flanked by sprigs of exotic ‘Byzantine blossom’. Like the decoration of the Lindisfarne Gospels it combines different cultural ingredients in a visual statement of the international contacts and heritage of the Insular Church, albeit in a less intellectually and artistically synthesised and harmonised fashion. It also contains the earliest examples of historiated (story-telling) initials, one of many Insular contributions to the integration of word and image. It is thought to have been made in Kent around 720-730, either at Canterbury or by the nuns of Minster-in-Thanet, a house known from Boniface’s correspondence with its abbess, Eadburh, to have been supplying the mission to the Germanic homelands with impressively penned and sumptuously gilded copies of scriptural texts, demonstrated by the famous request, expressed in a letter from St Boniface to Eadburh, that, following her earlier gift of books, she write him a copy of the Epistles of St Peter, to be elegantly penned in chrysography to impress potential converts, using gold which he sent her for the purpose.[ix] Eadburh is known, from Boniface's letter of thanks, to have complied

A possible example of early English female handwriting is a stylus inscription of the letters ‘EADB’ and ‘E’ on p. 47 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 30[3418], a copy of the Acts of the Apostles penned in an eighth-century ‘Kentish’ version of uncial script. Bischoff first suggested that this might signify use and perhaps ownership by Abbess Eadburh herself.[x] The volume later belonged to St Augustine’s, Canterbury but a prayer added on a blank leaf in the feminine gender (p. 70, ‘indignam famulam tuam’) indicates earlier female use: perhaps the book itself had originated in a convent scriptorium.

Rosamond McKitterick went further, to imply that, if ‘Kentish’ uncial such as this (also encountered in works such as the Vespasian Psalter and the Stockholm Codex Aureus) were to be seen as scriptorium specific, Thanet would have a claim as a producer of some of the most proficient and elaborate of early English illuminated liturgical manuscripts. These works are distinguished by their accomplished use of gold in chrysography and illumination – recalling Boniface’s request to Eadburh. These books and their ‘relatives’ have traditionally been viewed as Canterbury products, supported in some cases by provenance evidence. It is worth remembering, however, that a subsequent Canterbury provenance might be explained by the fact that Thanet’s property had been transferred to St Augustine’s by the eleventh century.[xi] Alternatively convents such as Thanet may have helped to stock Canterbury’s libraries. The supply of essential liturgical books for cathedrals and monasteries by convents (as well as their supply to labourers in the mission-fields) would be in accordance with evidence for such provision having occurred in a Merovingian milieu in the case of the nuns of Rebais, Faremoutiers-en-Brie, Jouarre, Chelles and perhaps Tauberbischofsheim and Kitzingen.[xii] In her work on this subject, Rosamond McKitterick went on to suggest that the role of women in the production of writing on the Continent may have been moulded by the example of English women who participated in missionary work there, such as Leoba and Walburg (sister of Willibald and Wynnibald) in the circle of Boniface, and by other women who came into contact with English clerics, such as Harlindis and Relindis of Aldeneik in Flanders who were associated with Willibrord and who are said to have copied a Gospelbook themselves.[xiii]

That such influences travelled along a two-way thoroughfare is signalled by McKitterick’s suggestion that observances within Frankish convents and double monasteries, where female book production is comparatively well attested, are similarly likely to have been transmitted back to England. Thus the provisions made in the Nuns’ Rule of Caesarius of Arles may well have some relevance in an Insular milieu. The rule was composed in the first half of the sixth century for use by his sister Caesaria, for reading, conducting the Daily Office, teaching the illiterate to read and for the custodianship of books (“Those who are put in charge of the wine cellar or of clothing or books, or of the gate or the wool work shall receive the keys upon a copy of the Gospels…”).[xiv]Caesarius’ rule makes no specific provision for the copying of books, but then neither does the Rule of St Benedict, or other of the influential early rules of common life, perhaps subsuming such activity under the general heading of manual labour or study. That Caesaria and her nuns did in fact manufacture books is, however, confirmed by the Life of St Caesarius, where it is stated that “The mother Caesaria, whose work with her community so flourished, that amidst psalmody and fastings, vigils and readings, the virgins of Christ lettered most beautifully the divine books, having the mother herself as teacher”.[xv]

The earliest extant books which may have been made in England or Scotland (such as Durham A.ii.10 and the Book of Durrow)[xvi] are strongly influenced by those used by the missions of Columba and / or Augustine and made in Ireland, Italy or Gaul (one such being the famous ‘St Augustine Gospels’, an Italian Gospelbook which has long been claimed to have been brought to Britain by Augustine, although without any substantiation other than the presence within it of eighth-century annotations in an English hand and late medieval indications of a Canterbury provenance).[xvii] However, differences in approach and practice between the Roman and Irish traditions, notably divergence in the calculations for the dating of Easter, occasioned an important synod at St Hild’s monastery of Whitby in 664 at which the king of the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, Oswy, ordered adherence to the ways of Rome – a significant decision to become an effective part of the European mainstream (ecclesiastically, politically and commercially), rather than a marginal and potentially schismatic church and series of kingdoms. The process of reconciliation and integration of the two traditions, with their respective strengths, was accomplised by figures such as St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Bishop Ecgbert (an Englishman who was active in Ireland and Scotland) and Abbot Adomnán of Iona.

The Lindisfarne Gospels, made around 715-20 as a focal point for the shrine of St Cuthbert, is an exuberant celebration of the successful integration of cultures and of an oecumen which stretched from the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Its distinctive ‘Insular’ style of decoration effectively combines visual references to the many cultural contributions to that oecumen. Its cross-carpet pages resemble Middle Eastern prayer-mats (which were sometimes also used in northern Europe as part of the Good Friday liturgy, as indicated by an Ordo which was familiar to Bede).[xviii] Its Gospel incipits explode across the page in a riot of Celtic and Germanic ornament, conflating Latin, Greek and runic-style letter-forms, and are representative of a common western and eastern solution to the threat of idolatry in which the Word itself becomes the vehicle for the beautification of the divine through the medium of sacred calligraphy. Its schematic evangelist miniatures convey a scriptural and exegetical base for the reading of their imagery and display a stylistic affinity with the frescoes and mosaics of Early Christian Rome and Byzantium. The book’s artist-scribe, probably Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne (698-721), conceived and made the book in an heroic one-man feat of ascetic opus dei - like St Cuthbert doing battle with his demons on the harsh rock of his hermitage on behalf of all Creation. It was a portal to prayer both in the making and using.

In 716, around the time that work on the Lindisfarne Gospels was commenced (and no doubt a significant correspondence), Bede’s beloved Abbot Ceolfrith, leader of the twin Northumbrian monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, left England to retire in Rome. Earlier in his career he had accompanied the monasteries’ founder, a Northumbrian nobleman called Benedict Biscop, on one of his many trips to Rome. The influential monasteries they constructed in their native England, fabric of which still survives, are an eloquent testimony to the impact that Roman churches such as Sta Maria Maggiore, SS Quattro Coronati, SS Cosmas and Damian and Sta Maria Antiqua made upon them. They commissioned masons and glaziers from Gaul to construct their churches ‘more romanum’ and furnished them with images from Italy and Gaul and with one of the greatest libraries of the age, filled with books obtained on their travels. Another great romanophile was Wilfrid of York, who undertook similar building campaigns at Ripon and Hexham – the latter celebrated in the early Middle Ages as the largest church north of the Alps. Ceolfrith took with him on his return to Rome one of three great single volume Bibles made in the Monkwearmouth / Jarrow scriptorium as a gift for the Pope. Ceolfrith sadly died en route in Gaul but his gift was taken on to Rome by his companions and his successor, Abbot Hwaetberht, received due papal acknowledgement of the communities’ degree of romanitas.[xix] Ceolfrith’s pandect still survives in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence, where it is known as the Codex Amiatinus in acknowledgement of its medieval provenance at Monte Amiato. There Ceolfrith’s dedication inscription naming him was erased in favour of a local saint and it was not until the 1880s that it was recognised by de Rossi as the work of English rather than Italo-Byzantine scribes and artists, so ‘Roman’ are its styles of uncial lettering, diagrams and miniatures and its Vulgate text.[xx] Yet this was no slavish emulation of Italian exemplars, as we shall see, but the complex work of a dedicated editorial team at Monkwearmouth / Jarrow, led by the greatest scholar of his day – Bede. In 716 the most traditional of the Irish foundations, Columba’s Iona itself, finally acknowledged conformity to the practices of Rome. Ceolfrith’s pandect served as the ambassador of the Insular world, proclaiming Catholic orthodoxy. The Apostolic Age had come to fruition. The Gospel had been carried to the farthest edges of the known world and the distinctive and vital contribution of those far-flung isles was reflected back to the centre. The Codex Amiatinus and the Lindisfarne Gospels are still considered to be amongst the foremost and most textually ‘pure’ examples of St Jerome’s Vulgate edition. This alone is adequate testimony of the importance of the Insular contribution to the transmission of the Bible, but as we shall see this is just one part of the story.

Christianity is a religion of the Word which nonetheless has had also to rely, especially in its early stages, upon oral tradition – what people told one another, in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and then the Latin and vernacular languages. Written testimonies and individual books (or groups of books) of the Bible initially circulated as informally produced pamphlets on papyrus and parchment and it was not until ‘official’ attempts to gather them together, to assess their validity and ‘codify’ them as complete bodies of work of a ‘canonical’ (or approved) nature that complete Bibles were produced, the earliest being the fourth-century Greek copies – the Codex Sinaiticus and the Bibles (thought now to be lost) known to have be commissioned by the Emperor Constantine who had recently converted to Christianity, ultimately leading to its acceptance as the state religion of the late Roman Empire. The early Church councils played an important part in this process, which was a gradual one. An earlier campaign to likewise codify the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) had led to the production of a Greek translation / edition, now known as the Septuagint, in Alexandria in the late third century B.C., this being one of several Greek versions subsequently in circulation.[xxi] Jerome was a Latin speaker and,[xxii] by the time he came into papal service, there were many different Latin versions circulating throughout the Empire’s territories. The variants were generally small differences in wording, spelling and punctuation, but these could be significant. These versions are generally grouped under the heading ‘Old Latin’, and were also known as ‘vulgata’ or vulgar / vernacular.[xxiii] Jerome sought to purge the Latin text of its errors and variants, with reference to the Greek versions. He subsequently went on to return to the Hebrew in his attempts to get as close as possible to the original meaning.[xxiv] Although Jerome had been commissioned to produce a new Latin ‘Vulgate’ by Pope Damasus, as there were (as Jerome tells us in his ‘Novum Opus’ prefatory letter) almost as many versions as codices,[xxv] his work did not supplant the earlier rescensions and in many copies his ‘Vulgate’ and Old Latin readings became blended, producing many different ‘mixed’ texts. Other early Christian authors also undertook their own editions.[xxvi] By the time that ‘the Vulgate’ came to be printed much work was necessary on the part of Church councils and editors to decide on its form, as devised by Jerome, which itself varies according to the edition. Regaining the original text therefore becomes a complex process of distillation.

In their attempts to regain Jerome’s original work on the Vulgate, modern textual scholars (such as Wordsworth and White and Bonifatius Fischer) have compared and collated the texts of a vast body of manuscript copies and have grouped them into families on the basis of their variant readings.[xxvii] As a result, the texts of the Codex Amiatinus (a complete Bible) and of the Lindisfarne Gospels are thought to represent particularly good early copies which may be relatively close to Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’ version. They seem to have been based upon a southern Italian Gospelbook and a variety of other exemplars (including some which had been copied and edited at Cassiodorus’ sixth-century Italian monastery, the Vivarium) which were in turn edited at Monkwearmouth / Jarrow to produce what is known as the ‘Italo-Northumbrian’ family of texts. Other copies of the Gospels copied by Insular scribes employ a plethora of versions, the product of numerous exemplars and of local interventions in the course of copying and correcting. Most of these might be classified as ‘mixed’ texts, although they may exhibit a greater or lesser degree of agreement with what has come to be known as the Vulgate. Scholars have tended to group them into ‘mixed Italian’ or ‘mixed Irish / Celtic’ families on the basis of their variant readings and the prefatory matter which accompanies the Gospels (with the inclusion of prefatory lists of Hebrew names, for example, being a particularly ‘Irish / Celtic’ feature), and on the supposed origins of their exemplars. It should be remembered that these classifications have been applied by scholars in an attempt to impose order on what was evidently a very fluid and organic process of textual transmission. ‘Mixed’ texts incorporate Vulgate readings, in varying levels of frequency. It can be difficult to know which variants are significant and which incidental.[xxviii]

Biblical texts of ‘mixed’ textual traditions circulating in the Insular churches would have reached Britain and Ireland from a variety of sources, notably Italy, Gaul and northern Africa (to judge from evidence for early ecclesiastical and trading contacts).[xxix] These ‘mixed’ texts would have assumed even more local forms when successively copied, merged and emended by Insular scribes. They were exported, in turn, to continental Europe by missionary movements such as those led by the Irish monks, Columbanus and Fursey, and by Anglo-Saxons such as Wilfrid, Willibrord (who led a joint Irish / English mission) and Boniface. The widespread monastic federations (parochiae) which resulted from such ‘voluntary exile for Christ’ (peregrinatio), that of Columbanus stretching from Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy, for example, would have fostered their wider dissemination and have imported back in turn further continental textual and palaeographical variants into their scriptoria and those of other Insular foundations. The influential work by Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), has fostered the view that the injection of Insular influence into the European ecclesiastical arena was largely confined to the missionary endeavours of the late seventh and eighth centuries, an impression bolstered by E. A. Lowe’s frequent use of the term ‘an Insular centre on the Continent’ in his magisterial survey of manuscripts made before 800, Codices Latini Antiquiores.[xxx] However, recent work by scholars such as Bernhard Bischoff, Herrad Spilling, Rosamond McKitterick, Nancy Netzer and Joanna Story is fostering a recognition that the recruitment of Insular personnel to ‘Insular’ centres on the Continent continued well into the ninth century and to an appreciation of the complex organic processes by means of which distinctive scriptoria such as those at Fulda, Würzburg and Echternach grew out of the interaction of Insular and Frankish scribes, artists and exemplars, producing distinctive books during the eighth century such as the Trier Gospels and the Stuttgart Psalter from Echternach and the Cuthbercht Gospels, perhaps from Salzburg.[xxxi] Books also continued to be exported from Insular scriptoria to their continental associates, such as the St Gall Gospels which was made in late eighth-century Ireland and travelled to Columbanus’ Swiss foundation.[xxxii] Distinctive Insular practices in book production – codicological preparation,[xxxiii] hierarchy of script,[xxxiv] word separation, punctuation and abbreviation,[xxxv] and pioneering use of decoration and illustration to articulate and comment upon the text[xxxvi] – made a fundamental and major contribution to the history of book production and of the transmission and reception of Scripture.

The texts of most Insular Gospelbooks are therefore technically of the ‘mixed’ variety. It is certainly not the case that the ‘Vulgate’ was accorded primacy or that the history of Insular Gospelbook production was a quest to achieve a textual purity embodied by Jerome’s Vulgate version. That having been said, the work of Insular scribes and scholars does exhibit an interest in comparative readings and a respect for copies of texts which were ultimately associated by tradition or inscription with venerated figures in Church history, such as Jerome. The Gospel texts of the Codex Amiatinus and the other Ceolfrith Bibles (of which only fragments survive), of the Gospelbooks made at Monkwearmouth / Jarrow (the Cuthbert Gospel of St John and the uncial Gospel fragments appended to the Durham Gospels and to the Utrecht Psalter) and of the Lindisfarne Gospels all seem to have been copied largely from the same southern Italian Gospelbook archetype and incorporate fewer variants from the Vulgate than other Gospelbooks made in Britain and Ireland or in Insular centres on the Continent (as defined by printed editions which have themselves relied upon such manuscripts to establish their readings, thereby necessitating a rather circular approach).

Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’ edition was not promulgated as an 'authorised' version.[xxxvii] Even when such landmarks in textual dissemination have occurred they are not always uniformly adopted and there is an innate conservatism which often manifests itself in such matters, and which may be particularly strong when there is a marked element of orality involved. One has only to consider the many printed editions of the Christian Bible in use throughout the world at the present to begin to appreciate this.

Gospelbooks would appear, even given the low rates of survival of material of this period, to have been the most numerous sacred texts to have been copied by Insular scribes, whether as high-grade focal points of shrines, as working service and reference books, or as portable, small-format copies for personal study and for use in the field when preaching (these latter being known as pocket Gospelbooks and being particular popular in Ireland).[xxxviii] The next most frequently represented biblical text is the Psalter. This pattern of frequency may indicate an initial prioritisation of supply of books for the core lections used in public and private devotions – the Gospels and the Psalms, and / or a higher comparative rate of preservation of such texts because they were safeguarded and revered as church treasures and relics. Biblical texts usually circulated as individual books or as groups (e.g. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament).[xxxix] Other than Gospelbooks, Gospel fragments and Psalters, the Insular biblical codices or fragments which survive from Britain and Ireland (excluding those probably by Insular scribes at work on the Continent) are as follows (in approximate chronological order): [xl]

1.       Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Amiatino I, early eighth century, uncial, (c.505x340mm, written space 360-75x260mm; two columns of 44 – 45 lines). Complete Bible, the Codex Amiatinus; Monkwearmouth / Jarrow, one of the three pandects made for Abbot Ceolfrith before his departure for Rome in 716.[xli]

2.       London, British Library, Add. MSS 37777 and 45025 and Loan MS 81 (on loan from the National Trust), early eighth century, uncial (c.480x335mm, written space 360x255mm; two columns of 44 lines). Monkwearmouth / Jarrow, fragments of one of the three pandects made for Abbot Ceolfrith before 716.[xlii]

3.       Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.5 + London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius C.viii, eighth century, set minuscule, (c.295x230mm, written space 250x165mm; single columns of 27 lines); Pauline Epistles, Britain or possibly Ireland, Lowe ‘written in England, probably by an Irish scribe’, carries a Pelagian gloss.[xliii]

4.       Durham, Cathedral Library, MS C.iv.7, flyleaves, eighth century, half-uncial (c.260x228mm, written space 240x175mm; two columns of 30 lines); Leviticus, Northumbria.[xliv]

5.       London, British Library, Egerton MS 1046a, eighth century, cursive minuscule (c.310x225mm, written space 260x200mm); Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus; Northumbria (?).[xlv]

6.       London, British Library, Egerton MS 1046b, eighth century, hybrid minuscule (c.310x225mm, written space 260x200mm); Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus; Northumbria (?).

7.       Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 820 (h), late eighth century, cursive minuscule (now c.150x235mm, estimated written space 230x200mm; one column of 22 – 23 lines); Minor Prophets; England, Southumbria?[xlvi]

8.       Oxford, Bodleian Library, lat. bibl. C.8 (P) + Salisbury, Cathedral Library, MS 117 + olim Cheltenham, Phillipps Collection 36183 (now Takamiya Collection, Tokyo), early ninth century, cursive minuscule (c.350x260mm, written space 280x190mm; two columns of 28 lines); Numbers and Deuteronomy; Southumbria.[xlvii]

9.       Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys 2981 (4), ninth century, minuscule (c.315x210mm, 20 lines); Daniel; Northumbria? (Lowe favoured ‘written probably in England, in a centre under Irish influence).[xlviii]

10.   London, British Library, Royal MS 1.E.vi + Oxford, Bodleian Library, lat. bibl. B.2(P) + Canterbury, Cathedral Library, Additional MS 16, c.820-840, half-uncial and hybrid minuscule (c.470x345mm, written space 345x265mm; two columns of 42 lines); fragmentary Gospels and Acts of the Apostles (XVIII.27-XXI.12), probably once part of a single-volume Bible known as the Royal Bible, Canterbury. [xlix]

Given the comparatively large numbers of complete or fragmentary Insular Gospelbooks made before 900 that survive, it is likely that other books of the Bible may have circulated separately or have been grouped into volumes of books which warranted a slightly smaller format and less formal script that those used for complete Bibles and Gospelbooks, which probably also performed a display function (and, in the case of several Gospelbooks marked with lections, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Durham Gospels and the Barberini Gospels, a liturgical function as well). The dimensions of the manuscripts listed above also indicate that, after 800, there may, in any case, have been a trend towards smaller formats and greater use of minuscule scripts for sacred texts. This may have owed something to contemporary developments in Carolingian book production and experimentation with caroline minuscule as a multi-purpose script. It is noteworthy that in early Anglo-Saxon England a heightened perception of script hierarchy seems to have prevailed and that the dignity accorded to scriptural and liturgical volumes extended even into the use of high-grade uncial script for the earliest surviving English charters, of seventh-century date, lending them additional weight.[l] By the ninth century this hierarchical approach, in which form and formality were geared to function, was receding.

New Testament volumes may also have been in circulation, as attested by the Book of Armagh, a collection of texts relating to St Patrick along with the New Testament and the Life of St Martin.[li] However, the particular nature of this book, known from its colophon to have been made in Armagh c. 807, seems designed to emphasise the authority of St Patrick, apostle to the Irish, and that of his archdiocese of Armagh and it cannot, therefore, be considered typical. There are two volumes of continental manufacture that contain New Testament texts and that exhibit Insular features in their decoration and script which point either to Insular exemplars or input in training: Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. M. p. th. f. 69, a late eighth-century copy of the Pauline Epistles made in Germany (probably in the Würzburg region), which contains a highly unusual depiction of the Crucifixion set above an image of Christ calming the storm;[lii] and an illustrated Apocalypse (Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 99), probably made in the north-western area of the Carolingian Empire (perhaps around Liège ?) during the early ninth century and perhaps copied from an Insular exemplar, as indicated by the use of interlace and the figure style.[liii] That an image cycle of St John’s vision of the Apocalypse was known in Insular circles is conveyed to us by Bede, who relates that such a cycle was amongst the imagines brought back by Benedict Biscop from his travels in Italy and Gaul and used to adorn the north wall of his church at Monkwearmouth.[liv] Commentaries by Insular authors, notably Bede, also testify to the clerical potential for a full grounding in biblical scholarship, however widely available or not this may have been.

Single volume Bibles - pandects - were exceptions, usually linked to major editorial campaigns and / or representing consciously devised landmarks in dissemination, such as the programmes of codification and circulation of texts associated with the state sponsorship of Constantine and Charlemagne, and with the monastic initiatives of Cassiodorus and Ceolfrith. In compiling them a number of different exemplars would be used for their component parts, of heterogenous provenance. Such Bibles might be made for reference (as Ceolfrith intended the two pandects he left for Monkwearmouth and Jarrow to be), or as exemplars for copying, to ensure some measure of uniformity (as in the case of the ninth-century Alcuin or Tours Bibles and perhaps in the case of Gospelbook exemplars disseminated from Monkwearmouth / Jarrow).

Free from the confines of labelling of orthodoxy, the early rescensions of either principal text strand could be modified or glossed as need dictated, Gregory the Great stating, in his Moralia in Job, that he had used Jerome's text as his basis but had no hesitation in varying it in accordance with the Old Latin where this accorded with his own moral and ascetic interpretation (e.g. his more inclusive 'unto us is born a saviour' instead of Jerome's 'unto you' Lk 2.11).[lv] Such an approach, as well as the familiarity of tradition and orality, may have played a role in determining some of the places where the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, departs from the ‘Vulgate’ text of its main exemplar. Another important factor to bear in mind is the influence of the performance of the liturgy itself. De Hamel has suggested that the dissemination of the ‘Vulgate’ version favoured in what is known as the ‘Italo-Northumbrian’ family of texts may have had a lot to do with its use within the reformed liturgy introduced under Roman influence and practised at Monkwearmouth / Jarrow and other Northumbrian centres from the late seventh to early eighth century onwards.[lvi]

Some of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ variant readings may represent those with which its scribe was familiar prior to his obtaining a new exemplar which was a comparatively good representative of Jerome’s version of the ‘Vulgate’. The influence of another rescension can also be seen in the arrangement of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ 16-page Canon Tables and perhaps in some of its textual variants. This was the New Testament edition by Victor of Capua (of c.547) which conflated readings from a ‘Vulgate’ version of the four Gospels to form a Gospel harmony (or diatessaron, not an influential text until the central Middle Ages). Such is the Capuan Codex Fuldensis, a sixth-century Italian copy which may have been made in Capua for Victor himself and which later may have come to England as it was owned by the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface.[lvii]

Insular scribes were also influenced by another early Christian biblical editor of note - Flavius Cassiodorus (c.485-580), a Roman Senator of Squillace who served under the Ostrogothic ruler, Theodoric, but who retired in the face of the Byzantine wars to found a monastery on his estate, known as the Vivarium (named for the fishponds which were a feature of its civilised lifestyle). A key figure in the establishment of an approach to biblical studies founded upon the syllabus of the liberal arts, and an influential advocate of responsible copying and dissemination of texts, his textual intervention was more concerned with the form and mechanics (orthography, latinity) of the text, rather than with its actual revision. His own exegetical works take the Old Latin as their basis, his 'Novem Codices' or nine-volume copy of this text being prepared as his own working copy. He was also responsible for producing an illustrated one-volume Bible - the Codex Grandior, a copy of which Ceolfrith brought back from Rome to Monkwearmouth / Jarrow - the Old Testament of which was based upon Jerome's earlier Hexaplaric version, based in turn on the Septuagint. The Gospels in the Codex Grandior are thought to have been the Vulgate and the rest of the New Testament probably Old Latin. Cassiodorus also produced a smaller one-volume Bible ('pandectam...minutiore manu') which was Vulgate throughout. That the pandect brought by Ceolfrith to Monkwearmouth/ Jarrow was the Codex Grandior, rather than Cassiodorus' smaller pandect, is indicated by Bede's reference to a picture of the Tabernacle which he had seen, and which was copied in the Codex Amiatinus (ff. 2v-3r), corresponding to one which Cassiodorus said he had included in the Codex Grandior.[lviii]

However, the editors / makers of the Codex Amiatinus did not use the Hexaplaric text of the Codex Grandior but substituted a primarily Vulgate version of the text. It is possible that reference was made to Cassiodorus' smaller pandect. However, there is no firm evidence that there was a copy of this in Northumbria (Bede simply saying that Ceolfrith added three pandects to the one he brought from Rome), and a detailed analysis of Amiatinus (as outlined by Richard Marsden) indicates that its component texts are likely to have been compiled and edited from a variety of sources.[lix]

Its Gospels relate to those in the Lindisfarne Gospels, which includes feasts thought to relate to the Naples area, whence the exemplar for both seems to have originated.[1] In Amiatinus the Gospels are preceded by a Majesty miniature,[2] the Novum Opus, Canon Tables on seven pages, then the Plures Fuisse, the Gospel prefaces (argumenta) partly edited to agree with early Irish versions,[3] and chapter lists (capitula lectionum) which agree with the Lindisfarne Gospels’ (the lists of Neapolitan feasts included in Lindisfarne are, however, omitted).

The varied textual affiliations of the Codex Amiatinus, which has cautiously, and in the absence of fuller evidence, to be taken as representative of the other two Ceolfrith Bibles, therefore indicate that, rather than undertaking a direct copy of any one of Cassiodorus' major oeuvres, as has often been suggested, the scriptoria of Monkwearmouth / Jarrow conceived of a major editorial project which would locate them within the prime lines of transmission of the sacred texts. They may have been inspired to produce uncharacteristic and ambitious single volume Bibles in emulation of the Codex Grandior, and they may have made reference to this, and to any other of Cassiodorus' biblical works that they possessed, but as one of a number of sources. Amiatinus was not an antiquarian facsimile of an Italian pandect (such as Cassiodorus' smaller pandect), or even an adaptation of the textual form of one earlier edition into the codicological format of another (such as a reworking of Cassiodorus's Novem Codices in the single-volume format of the Codex Grandior), but an active, dynamic work of scholarly compilation and emendation. The Ceolfrith Bibles were in themselves a 'new edition' . They represented a version of the ‘Vulgate’, and indeed are still viewed as good early witnesses of such a text, but they achieved this by a complex process of excavation, compilation and interpretation, working from a number of sources in emulation of, and probably with reference to, Jerome's own process of distillation from a plethora of varying sources from different earlier 'vulgata' traditions. It is not surprising that the Ceolfrith pandects should exhibit the influence of work undertaken on individual books by the leading scholar of the day, Bede, who was undoubtedly a driving force behind the enterprise initiated by Ceolfrith. Although not identified, his hand may even be amongst those of Amiatinus’ and the associated fragments’ scribal teams.

The famous 'Ezra' miniature in the Codex Amiatinus (f. Vr)[lx] should perhaps be read less, as some commentators have suggested,[lxi] as an image of Cassiodorus, adapted with reference to the great preserver of the Judaic Scriptures, Ezra the scribe, but as a homage to the continued process of rediscovery and emendation of sacred text, continually inspired by the Holy Spirit, in which the Ceolfrith Bibles played a significant role. The bookcase, or armarium, containing its nine volumes simultaneously makes reference to Cassiodorus's work but labels them in an arrangement that does not accord with the clues given in his Institutiones to the organisation of his actual Novem Codices. Instead the labelling makes reference to book titles favoured by other writers, such as Augustine:[lxii] the number nine symbolically represents the Novem Codices, whilst the labelling indicates that they were part of a fluid, living tradition. That the image of Ezra is likely to have originated at the Vivarium is reinforced by Cassiodorus's Institutiones (5.22, 12.3), in which he gives various lists of the sacred books and refers to an image of the Tabernacle and to diagrams of the arrangements of the biblical books, all of which are perpetuated in the Codex Amiatinus. This is an important, if apparently minor, adjustment to perception of the image, for it indicates that both Cassiodorus and those responsible for the Ceolfrith Bibles were not attempting to provide an 'authorised' edition, but an authoritative one, drawing and improving upon the best sources they could find in order to carry forward the process of revelation and understanding of the divine Word. It would have been anathema to them to view their work as the 'last word' - the process of transmission and exploration was a divinely inspired one, which had to be perpetuated.

This is significant when we consider the relationship of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Ceolfrith Bibles, to its closest textual relatives (BL, Royal 1.B.vii, the St Petersburg Gospels and the Gotha Gospels), and to other Insular Gospelbooks. Is the Lindisfarne Gospels itself a 'facsimile' of the Gospels component of the Ceolfrith Bibles, or of the Italian, probably Neapolitan, Gospelbook which was the source for this part of their texts  - as one author has recently put it 'a complete sixth-century Gospel book in disguise'?[lxiii] Should 'achieving' close proximity to Jerome's Vulgate necessarily be considered as an evolutionary advancement against which other texts should be measured? The answer on both counts is no.

The Lindisfarne Gospels' unique arrangement and decorative enhancement of its prefatory matter seems to have been constructed in order to emphasise Jerome as the ultimate authority for its particular version of the Vulgate text, and to stress the function of the Eusebian Canon Tables which he espoused as a means of navigating and comprehending the inter-relationships of the four Gospels. The Lindisfarne Gospels preserves the recollection of its principal textual exemplar, which was probably a southern Italian Gospelbook which came on inter-library loan via Monkwearmouth / Jarrow or was one of their scriptoria’s copies of it, including some distinctive matter relating to Italian liturgical feasts (of probable South Italian / Neapolitan character) which were probably retained as a means of enhancing the perceived authority of an exemplar from an ‘exotic’ background, originating in an important centre, the books of which were venerated because of its significance within the early Christian tradition..[lxiv]

The Lindisfarne Gospels can, therefore, be seen on one level as a conscious statement of Italian textual influence and of affiliation with Jerome’s version of the ‘Vulgate’, but it is not exclusively a copy of a single source, even for its texts, let alone for its highly individual decoration which, amongst other innovative features, represents the most ambitious attempt to articulate text by the ornamentation of script at text breaks that the world had seen and which may be discerned to have been the result of innovative, original planning of layout on the part of its artist-scribe.[lxv] In this respect its closest relatives within the Insular corpus would appear to be the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells.

An important aspect of the Vulgate tradition which, although obvious, is worth remembering here, is that Jerome's work essentially represents a systemmatic attempt to translate and revise Scripture in the vernacular (the 'vulgar' language of common currency). We are used, when considering the medieval West, to defining 'vernacular' as ostensibly 'not Latin', or more correctly as not one of the 'linguae sacrae' (i.e. Hebrew, Greek or Latin, the languages used in the transmission of the sacred texts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition). This shift in perception of the status of Latin (the basis of the emergent 'romance' languages) owed a great deal to Jerome and to Popes Damasus and Gregory the Great in their promotion in the West of Latin versions of Scripture and in raising ‘vulgar’ Latin to literary heights.[lxvi]

The interaction between literacy and orality is important here. The Monarchian prologues, which are embedded in the prologues preceding each of the Gospels in Lindisfarne, reinforced the idea of committing oral tradition to writing, stating as they do the authority from whom each evangelist heard their Gospel  - thereby supporting Jerome's campaign to translate into the vernacular (vulgate), as part of this line of initially oral transmission. Indeed, most people’s knowledge of Scripture throughout the Middle Ages would continue to be oral and visual, rather than written. This might relate to the inclusion in the Lindisfarne Gospels’ Matthew miniature of the inspiring or dictating figure. According to the Monarchian prologues Matthew heard his Gospel from Christ. One level of reading of this part of the Lindisfarne Matthew image might therefore support an identification of the nimbed figure behind the curtain with Christ who simultaneously conveys the interpreted meaning of the Old Testament: the Temple curtain drawn aside by Christ’s sacrifice to allow the Old Testament, symbolised by the book he holds, to inform and to be reinterpreted by the New Testament written by St Matthew, the symbol of Christ’s incarnation. This would accord with other layers of multivalent interpretation that I have proposed for this miniature.[lxvii] This relationship is emphasised further in the Carolingian Touronian Vivian Bible (or ‘First Bible of Charles the Bald’) of 845 which contains a miniature (BNF, MS lat. 1, f. 3v) illustrating the inception and diffusion of Jerome's Vulgate in which he is shown as an author, teacher (of male and female pupils) and distributor of copies of his work which fill the churches.[lxviii] This also depicts an armarium containing earlier written authorities, as does the Amiatinus Ezra miniature which I have in turn related to the Lindisfarne Gospels’ enigmatic figure behind the curtain who fulfills, at one level, a similar role to the bookcase in symbolising the transmission of Scripture. [lxix]

An appreciation of the Vulgate tradition as part of a continuing process of interaction with orality and with transmission in the vernacular might conceivably have had some bearing on contemporary work to translate Scripture into the English vernacular, signalled by Bede's translation work on John's Gospel (‘the little Gospel that treats of the things of love’), conducted on his deathbed in 735, which would lead eventually to Aldred's gloss, added to the Lindisfarne Gospels in the mid-tenth century and translating the original Latin text into Old English, word by word, between the lines. Aldred’s gloss is in the Northumbrian dialect and displays an interest in the reforming agendas of the West Saxon Church and monarchy. The use of English in this context, displayed as part of a focal point of the shrine of the major saint of the North, St Cuthbert, at Chester-le-Street may have had a bearing upon the process of reunification of England in the wake of the Viking settlements and the creation of the Danelaw. For the Anglo-Saxons, and the Celts, their native languages were powerful tools in spreading the Word of God and they faced none of the restrictions that would lead to the condemnation of Wycliffe and Tyndale as heretics when they attempted the same thing in the later Middle Ages. Aldred opens his colophon on f. 259r of the Lindisfarne Gospels with a Latin synopsis of the Monarchian prologues outlining the process of transmission, which he translates into Old English. In associating himself with the names of the three figures to whom the making of the volume is ascribed (the maker, Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne; the binder, his successor,  Bishop Aethilwald; and the metalworker, Billfrith the Anchorite), Aldred presents himself as the fourth evangelist,[lxx] John, beloved of Christ, and places himself, and the English language, within that direct line of transmission from the divine to humankind.

Julian Brown pointed out that the Lindisfarne Gospels’ evangelist miniatures contain Greek inscriptions, but written in Latin characters with some Latin endings, and commented that this could be a local innovation.[lxxi] If so, this would parallel its approach to the fusing of roman capitals and runic features for the display script used here and for the Gospels opening display pages and incipit / explicit rubrics. There may also be an implicit intention of thereby symbolically placing the English vernacular in the tradition of translation, from Greek, to Latin, to English. The script used would thus visually convey the babble of tongues of the Tower of Babel, reconciled and made mutually intelligible by the power of the Holy Spirit, as at Pentecost, and by the sending out of the Apostles to the farthest corners of the earth (then thought to include the British Isles and Ireland) to preach the Gospel.[lxxii]

If the Lindisfarne Gospels represents a particular moment of celebration of Jerome's version of the Vulgate, it was not a frozen one. The complex interaction of textual rescensions continued and it would appear that, as we shall see, in some Insular Gospelbooks there was a tradition of adapting texts of one sort to another, perhaps more familiar form[lxxiii] Many ‘mixed’ texts continued to be copied and were, themselves, subject to further admixture from other versions of the Latin Gospel texts.

Alcuin of York, the English scholar who was so valued by Charlemagne and made Abbot of Tours (796-804), used both the ‘Mixed Italian’ and ‘Italo-Northumbrian’ traditions which were familiar to him in England when himself undertaking a single-volume revision of the Vulgate Bible which he completed in 800. In this he engaged in a process of scholastic correction, replaced Jerome's Hebraicum Psalter with the Gallicanum, based upon the Hexaplaric Greek, and added verse prologues and colophons. That he is likely to have been influenced in this by the Ceolfrith Bibles is indicated by the fact that he appears to have seen one of them at York, for his Carmina 69 quotes the inscription surrounding the Codex Amiatinus’ Ezra miniature. [lxxiv]

Alcuin's was not the only version in use in an early Carolingian context. The Court School drew heavily upon the English experience and Theodulf of Orléans upon the Mixed Spanish tradition of his homeland when preparing his revised text. Abbot Maurdramnus of Corbie also undertook a six-volume revision of the Bible, in the course of which some of the earliest experiments in devising a suitable script for rapid copying and ease of legibility - caroline minuscule - occurred.[lxxv] But by the end of the ninth century the Alcuinian rescension was becoming the norm throughout much of Europe, its rate of penetration elsewhere being commensurate with that of Carolingian influence and Church reform generally. Although not officially promoted as an 'authorised' version, it progressively assumed something approaching the status of one and exerted significant influence upon subsequent transmission.  It was to form the basis of the scholastic tradition of the twelfth-century 'Paris Bible' and thereby of the exegetically based studies conducted at Paris University.[lxxvi] This is not the place to embark upon a summary of the transmission of biblical texts during the High Middle Ages, but should serve merely to give a rudimentary indication of where the Insular contribution stands in the broad picture. As noted above, the Lindisfarne Gospels contributed also to another major strand of transmission, the emergence of a new vernacular Bible, with the addition in the 950s of Aldred’s gloss – the earliest surviving example of the Gospels in the English language.[lxxvii]

Anglo-Saxon England seems therefore, on the basis of the surviving evidence, to have received its knowledge of the Latin Gospels via three routes: from the ‘Italian Mixed’ tradition, associated with the Augustinian mission and the work of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and Abbot Hadrian (from North Africa, via Naples), based at Canterbury, and with St Wilfrid’s ‘romanizing’ activities; from the ‘Mixed Irish / Celtic’ tradition that had grown up in the Celtic Churches (which also evince familiarity with the other traditions); and from the Italo-Northumbrian editorial drive focusing, for the Gospels, upon Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’ version and emanating from Monkwearmouth / Jarrow. Given that the process of transmission was an organic and dynamic one, no single tradition assumed primacy, possibly not even in the key scriptoria with which they were associated. As with most matters appertaining to the Insular environment, permeation, imagination and synthesis are paramount, and we attempt an over-rigid classification and distinction at our peril. One feature which was appreciated within this fluidity was authority, in terms of a respect to be accorded to key figures within the Christian tradition (be they the early Church Fathers, or fathers of Christianity within the Insular milieu, such as Columba and Augustine of Canterbury). Jerome himself was well aware of the emergent medieval creative tension between 'traditio' and 'innovatio' and was at pains to justify and document his own editorial processes, as outlined in the 'Novum Opus' open letter to Pope Damasus. Bede was equally sensitive to such needs, especially as, like Jerome, he attracted significant controversy and criticism for presuming to make an active contribution to textual transmission and criticism. His letter, or 'apologia', to Bishop Acca of Hexham concerning his commentary on Luke, is a moving plea for understanding on the part of a scholar who is evidently hurt, and somewhat bemused, by the misunderstanding by others of his purpose and of his own heightened perception and comprehension of the tradition within which he is actively working.[lxxviii] He writes that in those who translate, expand or humbly copy Scripture the Spirit continues to work, as in the biblical authors who were first inspired to write them.[lxxix] Perhaps only those who had devoted their lives to becoming, simultaneously, a living ark of Scripture and a vessel capable of emptying itself completely in order to be filled with the Spirit, could fully sympathise with his vision and working methods,[lxxx] then as now. Bede was part of a living tradition, in which the inspiration accorded others needed to be valued and duly acknowledged and engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the inspiration of the contemporary writer.

That Celtic ecclesiastics were similarly aware is adequately conveyed by the emphasis placed upon the event which triggered St Columba's influential 'peregrinatio' - the charge of plagiarising a version of the Psalter from St Finian of Moville, which is said to have led to one of the biggest blood-baths in early Irish history, the Battle of Cul Dremne, the charge probably acting as a pretext for the playing out of dynastic politics, for Columba was a prince of the powerful expansive Uí Neíll dynasty. During the sixth century, Jerome's Bible was introduced to Ireland by Finian of Moville, probably via Italian sources. Columba was thus claiming credit for the introduction of a new textual rescension as his work, indicating the prestige attached to such work of scholarly transmission. Columba laying claim to Hieronymic tradition might explain the use of versions of the ‘Vulgate’ Gospels text in the Book of Durrow, where they are combined with prefatory matter of Irish / Celtic character.[lxxxi] The Vulgate was not widespread in Ireland, however, until the tenth century. Instead, a family of texts developed combining elements from the Old Latin and Vulgate traditions, which has been characterised as the 'Irish' or 'Celtic' mixed text.[lxxxii]A particularly distinctive feature of the prefatory matter of this textual family was the inclusion of the 'glosses on Hebrew Names'.[lxxxiii] Jerome had composed a 'Liber de Nominibus Hebraicis', inspired by the work of Philo and Origen, which explained the meaning of the Hebrew Names in both Testaments.[lxxxiv] This presumably influenced the Irish 'Hebrew Names'.  The Old Latin featured Graecised versions of these names, but Jerome brought them into line with Hebrew originals (rabbinic tradition included the practice of expanding upon the exegetical meaning of such names and, related to this, pronunciation was a major concern, given the absence of vowels from Hebrew script). There are no lists of Hebrew names in the Lindisfarne Gospels but they do occur in many other Insular Gospelbooks, even the relatively late, Southumbrian Barberini Gospels.

The comparatively high frequency of colophons within manuscripts with Celtic affiliations, and some of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, might be connected to the impulse to declare authority by association with named individuals. The Book of Durrow combines its version of the ‘Vulgate’ Gospels with Irish prefatory matter accompanied by a Columban colophon, its arrangement being particularly closely related to that of the Book of Kells.[lxxxv] The Echternach Gospels contains, as its primary text (not its corrections), another version of the Vulgate Gospels (generally similar to that in the Lindisfarne Gospels but not close enough to suggest a shared exemplar), with punctuation per cola et commata and a colophon, possibly originally by Cassiodorus, saying that it had been copied from one corrected against a copy owned by Jerome and subsequently in the library of Eugippius, Abbot of Lucullanum near Naples – another prime statement of pedigree and authority of exemplar; these are combined with Irish, Columban prefaces which are again related to those in the Book of Kells.[lxxxvi]

Seen in this context, the Lindisfarne Gospels, with its textual and stylistic affiliations, becomes less an attempt to 'facsimilise' an Italian copy of Jerome's Vulgate, than a sophisticated attempt to celebrate and document a particular authority. It does not contain a colophon, other than that added by Aldred which might itself be seen as a later statement of credentials within the Cuthbertine tradition, but its distinctive arrangement of prefatory matter which is distinguished, along with the opening suites of the Gospels themselves, by the greatest concentraton of decoration, declares unequivocally its affiliations with St Jerome. This should not be viewed simplistically as a declaration of 'romanitas'. Columba's close connections with the Hieronymic tradition have already been mentioned, but rather as an attempt to draw even closer to the authority of this renowned figure because of his seminal role in the universal dissemination of Scripture. This was in no guise the property of any localised tradition.[lxxxvii]

Even the intellectualised celebration of Jerome's ‘Vulgate’ version in the Lindisfarne Gospels was flexible enough to absorb other favoured readings, as can be seen from some of the manuscripts most closely related to it. In the Insular world the complex interaction of textual rescensions continued. Soon after production Royal 1.B.vii's Vulgate text was corrected to the Mixed Italian type, akin to that found in the Durham Gospels, which was also corrected soon after production to the Vulgate, as found in the Lindisfarne Gospels (probably in a second phase of correction conducted by the same hand that had provided corrections to its original text and which also corrected the Lindisfarne Gospels). The implication is that the Durham Gospels was written and then corrected; the same correcting hand then worked on the Lindisfarne Gospels and subsequently returned to the Durham Gospels for a second campaign of correction in accordance with the Vulgate text of the Lindisfarne Gospels or its exemplar. This was not a systematic or comprehensive correction, unlike that of the Echternach Gospels which presented an essentially Vulgate text and was subsequently corrected in its margins to the ‘Irish / Celtic’ mixed text. It would appear that there was either a tradition of adapting texts of one sort to another, perhaps more familiar or used form, or perhaps of turning these volumes, by correction against another version, into 'parallel' texts for study purposes (even if only for limited readings). Cassiodorus had pointed in his Institutiones to the importance of works being corrected against one another, the consensus of the voices of different versions coming together to achieve a harmony (rather than supplanting or shouting down one another) and in this, as in so many aspects of book production and use, he is likely to have influenced Northumbrian scribes.[lxxxviii] In their own limited fashion the corrections to the Insular Gospelbooks might in a sense be seen as the precursors within the early western monastic environment of the glossed and parallel text forms which were to prove so important in the subsequent study of the Bible in the Middle Ages and which had been introduced in Origen’s six-column comparative Hexapla.

There is also, of course, the probablility of the individual Gospels having circulated separately on occasion. The St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, deposited in Cuthbert’s coffin, is proof enough of this. The textual distinctions sometimes found between one Gospel and another within the same Gospelbook might also be explained by several different exemplars having been consulted, for individual Gospels. One such case may be the once splendid Northumbrian Gospelbook, dating from the first half of the eighth century (and post-dating the Lindisfarne Gospels) now preserved in fragmentary form as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 197B and London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho C.v, the textual affiliations of which vary markedly from Gospel to Gospel.[lxxxix] Further evidence of the circulation of the Gospels separately may be found in Bede’s allusion to the ceremony of the apertio aurium, one of the liturgical ceremonies used in the preparation of adult catechumens for baptism. During this ceremony four copies of the Gospels would be laid on the four corners of the altar, open at an evangelist miniature which was used didactically to explain the nature and symbolism of the four Gospels.[xc]

The Lindisfarne Gospels is thoughtfully designed and articulated, with a carefully planned layout of script and decoration designed not only to appear beauteous, but simultaneously dignified and exuberant. However, the apparent desire to retain certain components from the principal exemplar which were geared to its use in southern Italy, and perhaps reflected in certain liturgical practices revived in Northumbria, along with the addition of Canon Tables copied from a different source (the Capuan Codex Fuldensis, a sixth-century Italian copy perhaps  made in Capua for Victor himself and later owned by Boniface, in which they are applied to the conflated text of a diatessaron), have occasioned certain textual contradictions which have led some to suggest that the Lindisfarne Gospels would have functioned better as a conceptual and visual statement than as a working reference or servicebook. Aldred’s colophon tells us that it was once housed in a treasure bindng or book-shrine (cumdach) made by Billfrith the Anchorite. Sacred texts were powerful Christian symbols in their own right and their very presence on a high altar or as part of a shrine was imbued with spiritual and legal weight. Insular books of the high altar were often used for swearing oaths and guaranteeing legal transactions. As relics they were thought to guarantee healing and victory. The Cathach of Columcille means ‘the Battler’, as its hereditary keepers bore it before them into battle to ensure their success. The recently discovered Lough Kinale book-shrine from Ireland (now in the National Museum of Ireland) was not even intended to open. The Gospelbook it once contained, which resembled the Echternach Gospels in dimension, would not have been visible from the time it was contained in it during the late eighth century, until the shrine was discarded in a lake during a ninth-century Viking raid.[xci] However, a closer examination of the textual components of the Lindisfarne Gospels has shown that it would have functioned well, if necessary, for both reference and liturgical purposes. There are some signs of subsequent liturgical use in services, but these are comparatively limited and tend to relate to the more important feastdays in the liturgical year, including some (but not all) of the feasts associated with the cult of St Cuthbert.[xcii]

The text is punctuated per cola et commata, as became the norm for Jerome's Vulgate, as also found, for example, in Amiatinus, the St Cuthbert Gospel and the Echternach Gospels. In this late Antique system of punctuation the length of the line serves to clarify sense and sententia, marking the pauses between verses and the sub-pauses within them. The resulting mise-en-page is extremely elegant and conducive to legibility, if extravagant of membrane. Irish scribes had already begun to address problems of legibility and layout from an early date.[xciii] Amongst their many contributions to the palaeographical history of the West are the introduction of word separation and of a heightened and more systemmatic use of punctuation than that encountered in Antiquity, with the value of pause being marked by variations in number or positioning of the punctus – concerns born of the process of learning Latin as a foreign language and of converting a highly trained and sophisticated oral culture into a literate one.[xciv]

The Lindisfarne Gospels’ text is further articulated by the use of a programme of hierarchical decoration. The homogenous system of articulation which resulted, in which the hierarchy of text breaks is clearly shown and lections derived from several phases of liturgical development are integrated, is a remarkable one and represents a major contribution to book history. The background for this achievement lay within the earlier Insular tradition, from the early experiments with the use of decoration for textual articulation in the Cathach, Durham A.II.10 and the Book of Durrow, and would culminate in the equally innovative response of the Book of Kells in which certain text breaks are marked by whole pages of decoration.[xcv]

What is most intriguing, however, is the Lindisfarne Gospels’ inclusion of some lections of distinctively Roman use (Mt 16.9 and Jn 7.37, ff. 129v a5 and 228r a11) which were introduced to the Roman liturgy later than those in Frere's 'Standard Gospel-series', possibly even after the introduction of Stational Masses for the Thursdays in Lent were introduced to Roman usage by Pope Gregory II (715-31).[xcvi] These lections may have had a more limited earlier life, but their inclusion within the original programme of textual articulation of the Lindisfarne Gospels may provide valuable corroborative, if not actually conclusive, evidence of a later dating for its production of 715-20, which accords with the historical evidence for the growth of the cult of St Cuthbert at this time, rather than the traditional dating of 698 to coincide with the translation of Cuthbert’s relics to the high altar at Lindisfarne. They also indicate that the programme of marking lections by means of enlarged or decorated letters was being developed in the Lindisfarne Gospels, rather than being copied in its entirety from an exemplar, representing a living and still growing tradition which was completely up-to-date.

One of the most striking instances of this form of Insular decorative articulation occurs in one of the major decorated pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Chi-rho page (f. 29r), Mt 1.18, which opens Matthew’s narrative following the Genealogy of Christ. On this page one letter, the ‘C’ of Cum esset (Mt 1.18b), is left uncoloured, the blank vellum surrounded with red dots causing it to leap out at the viewer.  This feature was first noted by Julian Brown, but not fully accounted for.[xcvii] Various parts of Mt 1 featured in the lections for Christmas. The Matthean Genealogy of Christ was read during Matins on Christmas Day and before the Te Deum in the secular liturgy. The known Roman lections of Mt 1.18, however, all begin at ‘Cum esset’ rather than ‘Christi autem’ (which is included at the end of the Genealogy lection).[xcviii] The passage commencing ‘Cum esset’ was the reading for the Vigil of the Nativity. The ‘Christi autem’ part of the text which precedes it, and which is marked by a major decorated monogram (the ‘Chi-rho’) on a scale commensurate with the Gospel Incipits themselves, is also emphasised but seems not to have been a lection in widespread use. The only lection systems including a reading beginning ‘Christi autem’ are either northern Italian or the Northumbrian annotations to the Burchard Gospels, added at Monkwearmouth / Jarrow, which are thought to represent an adapted Neapolitan system.[xcix] Nonetheless, the Chi-rho also features magnificently in the decorative programme of several other Insular Gospelbooks not of the Italo-Northumbrian family, such as the Lichfield Gospels, the Barberini Gospels and the Book of Kells as discussed by Carol Farr.[c]

The Chi-rho was probaby accorded this special dignity by virtue of its importance as a sacred name, representing Christ himself and serving as a potent symbol of his Incarnation. However, some Insular churches may actually have followed the northern / southern Italian practice of beginning a lection with the ‘Christi autem’. Conversely, its continued ornamentation within Insular books may represent a fossilised recollection of an earlier, obsolete liturgical practice associated with Italian centres which had produced some of the influential early Gospel exemplars which circulated in the Insular milieu. The maker of the Lindisfarne Gospels covered both options, choosing both to celebrate the early lection with an exuberant ornamentation of the ‘Chi-rho’ and to mark within the decoration of the page the lection for the Vigil of the Nativity which was rapidly becoming the norm within the Roman rite and which commenced at ‘Cum esset’.[ci] Here, as in other aspects of liturgical articulation, the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibit a concern to simultaneously enshrine significant parts of the text and to incorporate up-to-date Roman liturgical practices.[cii] The marking of alternative lections in this way, especially within a major display page context, remains a remarkable feature of the textual and decorative programmes of the Insular Gospelbooks.[ciii]

That a luxurious volume such as the Lindisfarne Gospels should have perfomed a liturgical function, however limited, is significant in the face of scholarly scepticism as to whether such elaborately decorated books were ever actually meant to be used publicly, rather than being purely for display. Carol Farr has discerned similar tendencies in the Book of Kells, the full-page miniatures of which are increasingly being ‘read’ in relation to liturgical practices and exegetical sources. She has pointed out, by way of analogy, that the highly illustrated Syrian Rabbula Gospels was made expressly for reading in the liturgy and that two Insular luxury Gospelbooks, the Barberini and St Petersburg Gospels, contain marginal notations for lections (as also does the Durham Gospels).[civ] She also cites Alcuin’s prefatory poems for inclusion in ninth-century Carolingian Bibles which speak of the role of opulent manuscripts as ornaments of the Church and for reading aloud to the Church’s community.[cv] The evidence of the Lindisfarne Gospels would tend to support the conclusion that, although designed primarily for display in a cult context, it was important to the individual and community which made it that it should contain a commemoration of liturgical function, reconciling different Christian traditions in the same ecumenical way as in its decoration,[cvi] and that it should (on occasion) actually fulfil a role in the public performance of the liturgy.

This tendency towards synthesis can also be observed in the Monkwearmouth / Jarrow campaign of editing Scripture enshrined in the Ceolfrith Bibles. Bede tells us that Benedict Biscop designed the customs of Monkwearmouth / Jarrow by merging elements from seventeen different customaries to form a new, unified one.[cvii] Neither Monkwearmouth / Jarrow or Lindisfarne were in the business of  'facsimilising' or fossilising traditions; they were too busy contributing to a vibrant, living process.

What might it actually have meant to those who dedicated their lives to God’s service to be entrusted with the transmission of his Word, as preachers and as scribes? I would propose the extension of the metaphor of the scholar-priest to that of the scribe-priest. In a letter to Bishop Acca of Hexham concerning his commentary on Luke, Bede says that ‘I have subjected myself to that burden of work in which, as in innumerable bonds of monastic servitude which I shall pass over, I was myself at once dictator, notary, and scribe’.[cviii] This revealing passage shows that he regarded such work as an expression of monastic humility, an act of opus dei, and that he differentiated between the functions of author, note-taker and formal scribal transmitter. Cassiodorus, in his Institutiones, said that each word written by the monastic scribe was ‘a wound on Satan’s body’, thereby ascribing to the scribe the role of miles Christi, or soldier of Christ. In the same work he says that in those who translate, expand or humbly copy Scripture the Spirit continues to work, as in the biblical authors who were first inspired to write them. Indeed, as Jennifer O’Reilly has pointed out, Scripture lends the scribal analogy to the Lord himself (see Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 10:16; Ps. 44/45:1-2).Cassiodorus also says (in his Commentary on Psalm 44/45:1-2 and in the Institutiones) that the scribe could preach with the hand alone and ‘unleash tongues with the fingers’, imitating the action of the Lord who wrote the Law with his all-powerful finger (bringing to mind the pointing hand of God which features in later Anglo-Saxon evangelist miniatures).[cix] Bede pursues this theme in relation to Ezra the Scribe, who fulfilled the Law by restoring / writing its destroyed books, thereby opening his mouth to interpret Scripture and teach others. The act of writing is therefore presented as an essential, personal act for the scribe / preacher / teacher.[cx]

Such scriptural resonances have a bearing upon the circumstances of production of the Lindisfarne Gospels. This amazingly complex and elegant book is surprisingly the work of a single artist-scribe. The only other extant Insular illuminated manuscripts which favoured such solitary working patterns are the Book of Durrow and the Echternach Gospels (the damaged state of the Durham Gospels prevents comment).[cxi] This may have represented a recollection of a distinctive ‘Celtic’ scribal response to such injunctions to meditatio / contemplatio. The act of copying and transmitting the Gospels was to glimpse the divine and to place oneself in its apostolic service and this may, on occasion, have been seen as a solitary undertaking on behalf of the community, rather than a communal collaboration, as with many aspects of Celtic eremitic monasticism. The book becomes the monastic scribe’s desert and a sacrificial act of prayer and meditation – an ascetic spiritual and physical tour de force. This was not the norm, however, and any such scribal feats of ascetic heroism seem to have receded during the period. De luxe Gospelbooks of around 800, such as the Book of Kells and the Barberini Gospels, were the work of teams of scribes and artists (at least eight in Kells and five in Barberini), who collaborated closely. The Book of Armagh (of c.807) likewise features the work of three artist-scribes. An echo of Lindisfarne’s less coenobitic scribal practices may be detected here, however, for each scribe undertakes every aspect of the work on their sections as a self-contained entity – executing layout, writing, rubrication, decoration and even preliminary tacket sewing into quires, prior to binding, themselves. Yet only the master-scribe, Ferdomnach, is recorded in inscription in the volume, in the same way as the probable scriptorium master cum artist-scribe, Wigbald, is in the colophon to the Barberini Gospels.

In discussing the Ezra miniature in Ceolfrith’s Codex Amiatinus, Jennifer O’Reilly has drawn attention to the patristic concept of the ‘inner library’ and the necessity for each believer to make him or herself a library of the divine Word, a sacred responsibility which Cummian referred to as ‘entering the Sanctuary of God’ by studying and transmitting Scripture.[cxii] Books are the vessels from which the believer’s ark, or inner library, is filled. They are the enablers of direct, contemporary Christian action, channels of the Spirit, and gateways to revelation, for ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1).

The apostolic mission of bringing the Word of God to the furthest outposts of the known world and enshrining it there within the new Temple of the Word and embodiment of Christ– the Book – had been achieved. The material and literary culture of these island extremities proclaims that they were no provincial outpost, but a vibrant, integrated part of the universal, eternal communion.[cxiii]