The Book of Kells
(around 800)

Folio 2 recto	Folio 3 recto	Folio 5 recto	Folio 7 verso

Folio 8 recto	Folio 19 verso	Folio 27 verso	Folio 28 verso

Folio 29 recto	Folio 32 verso	Folio 33 recto	Folio 34 recto

Folio 40 verso	Folio 114 recto	Folio 114 verso	Folio 124 recto

Folio 129 verso	Folio 130 recto	Folio 183 recto	Folio 183 verso

Folio 188 recto	Folio 200 recto	Folio 202 verso	Folio 285 recto

Folio 290 verso	Folio 291 verso	Folio 292 recto	Folio 309 recto

Look closely at it and you will penetrate the innermost secrets of art; you will find embellishments of such intricacy, such a wealth of knots and interlacing links that you might believe it was the work of an angel rather than a human being. Giraldus Cambrensis
13th century scholar

The Book of Kells is an "illuminated manuscript" [1] of the four Gospels in Latin, written in black, red, purple, and yellow ink, and calligraphed in ornate script and lavishly illustrated in as many as ten colors. In addition to the gospels, it contains prefaces, summaries, and canon tables or concordances of gospel passages. It is written on vellum [pages made from animal skin] and contains a Latin text of the Gospels, written mostly in insular majuscule script [2] and accompanied by whole pages of decoration with smaller painted decorations appearing throughout the text. It is known for the array of pictures, interlaced shapes, and oranamental details. Today it is on permanent display at the Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland, where it is catalogued as MS 58. It now consists of 339 vellum leaves, called folios. The majority of the folios are part of larger sheets, called bifolios, which are folded in half to form two folios. The bifolios are nested inside of each other and sewn together to form gatherings called quires. On occasion, a folio is not part of a bifolio, but is instead a single sheet inserted within a quire. The important decorated pages often occur on single sheets.

About 1200 years ago Irish monks began the work at the scriptorium of the monastery at Iona, an island off the Western coast of Scotland. Iona, which was a missionary center for the Columban community, had been founded by St. Columba in the middle of the 6th century. By the 9th century, repeated Viking raids made Iona too dangerous. The community founded the Abbey of Kells, in County Meath of the Irish Midlands thirty miles northwest of Dublin.

The ecclesiastical reforms of the 12th century dissolved the Abbey of Kells, converting the abbey church to a parish church. The Book of Kells remained in Kells until 1654. In that year Cromwell's cavalry was quartered in the church at Kells, and the governor of the town sent the book to Dublin for safe-keeping. Henry Jones, who was to become bishop of Meath after the Restoration, presented the book to Trinity College in Dublin in 1661. Except for short periods of time, when the book was exhibited elsewhere, the book has remained at Trinity College since the 17th century. It has been displayed to the public in the Old Library at Trinity since the 19th century.

In the 16th century, the chapter numbers of the Gospels according to the division created by the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, were written in the margins of the pages in roman numerals by Gerald Plunkett of Dublin. In 1621 the folios were numbered by the bishop-elect of Meath James Ussher. In 1849 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were invited to sign the book. They in fact signed a modern flyleaf which was erroneously believed to have been one of the original folios. The page they signed was removed when the book was rebound in 1953.

Over the centuries the book has been rebound several times. During an 18th century rebinding, the pages were rather unsympathetically cropped, with small parts of some illustrations being lost. The book was also rebound in 1895, but that rebinding broke down quickly. By the late 1920s several folios were being kept loose under a separate cover. In 1953, the work was bound in four volumes by Roger Powell, who also gently stretched several of the pages, which had developed bulges.

Some folios have been lost. When the book was examined by Ussher in 1621 there were 344 folios. The extant folios are gathered into 38 quires. There are between four and twelve folios per quire (two to six bifolios). Ten folios per quire is common. The folios had lines drawn for the text, sometimes on both sides, after the bifolia were folded. Prick marks and guide lines can still be seen on some pages. The vellum is of high quality, although the folios have an uneven thickness, with some being almost leather, while others are so thin as to be almost translucent. The book's current dimensions are 330 by 250 mm. Originally the folios were not of standard size, but they were cropped to the current standard size during an 18th century rebinding. The text area is approximately 250 by 170 mm. Each text page has 16 to 18 lines of text. The manuscript is in remarkably good condition. The book was apparently left unfinished, as some of the artwork appears only in outline.

The book, as it exists now, contains preliminary matter, the complete text of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the Gospel of John through John 17:13. The remainder of John and an unknown amount of the preliminary matter is missing. The text in the Book of Kells is similar but not identical to that of the Vulgate (authoritative Latin translation of the Bible). There are numerous variants from the Vulgate, where Old Latin translations are used rather than Jerome's text. Although these variants are common in all of the insular gospels, there does not seem to be a consistent pattern of variation among the various insular texts. It is thought that when the scribes were writing the text they often depended on memory rather than on their exemplar.

The extant preliminary matter consists of two fragments of lists of Hebrew names contained in the gospels, the Breves causae and the Argumenta of the four gospels, and the Eusebian canon tables.

The fragments of the lists of Hebrew names appear the recto of the first surviving folio and one on folio 26, which is currently inserted at the end of the prefatory matter for John. The first list fragment contains the end of the list for the Gospel of Matthew. The missing names from Matthew would require an additional two folios. The second list fragment, on folio 26, contains about a fourth of the list for Luke. The list for Luke would require an additional three folios. The structure of the quire in which folio 26 occurs is such that it is unlikely that there are three folios missing between folios 26 and 27, so that it is almost certain that folio 26 is not now in its original location. There is no trace of the lists for Mark and John.
The Breves causae and the Argumenta also belong to a pre-Vulgate tradition of manuscripts. The Breves causae are summaries of the Old Latin translations of the Gospels. They are divided into numbered chapters. These chapter numbers, like the numbers for the canon tables, are not used on the text pages of the gospels. However, it is unlikely that these numbers would have been used, even if the manuscript had been completed, because the chapter numbers corresponded to old Latin translations and would have been difficult to harmonise with the Vulgate text. The Argumenta are collections of legends about the Evangelists. The Breves causae and Argumenta are arranged in a strange order. First come the Breves causae and Argumenta for Matthew, followed by the Breves causae and Argumenta for Mark. Then come the Argumenta of Luke and John, followed by the Breves causae of Luke and John. This anomalous order is the same as is found in the Book of Durrow, although the out of place Breves causae of Luke and John are placed at the end of the manuscript in Durrow, while the rest of the preliminaries are at the beginning. In other insular manuscripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Armagh, and the Echternach Gospels, each Gospel is treated as separate work and has its preliminaries immediately preceding it. The slavish repetition in Kells of the order of the Breves causae and Argumenta found in Durrow led the scholar T. K. Abbot to the conclusion that the scribe of Kells had either the Book of Durrow, or a common model in hand.
The canon tables of Eusebius of Caesarea predate the text of the Vulgate and were developed to cross reference the gospels. Eusebius divided the Gospel into chapters and then created tables which allowed readers to find where a given episode in the life of Christ was located in each of the Gospels.

The book was designed so that each of the Gospels would have an elaborate introductory decorative program. Each Gospel was originally prefaced by a full page miniature containing the four evangelist symbols, followed by a blank page. Then came a portrait of the evangelist which faced the opening text of the gospel, which was given an elaborate decorative treatment. The Gospel of Matthew retains both its Evangelist portrait (folio 28v) and its page of Evangelist symbols (folio 27r). The Gospel of Mark is missing the Evangelist portrait, but retains its Evangelist symbols page (folio 129v). The Gospel of Luke is missing both the portrait and the Evangelist symbols page. The Gospel of John, like the Matthew retains both its portrait (folio 291v) and its Evangelist symbols page (folio 290v). It can be assumed that the portraits for Mark and Luke, and the symbols page for Luke at one time existed, but have been lost. The use of all four of the Evangelist symbols in front of each Gospel is striking and was intended to reinforce the message of the unity of the Gospels.

The text is usually written in one long line across the page. Françoise Henry has identified at least three scribes in this manuscript, whom she has named Hand A, Hand B, and Hand C. Hand A is found on folios 1 through 19v, folios 276 through 289, and folios 307 through the end of the manuscript. Hand A for the most part uses the brown gall-ink common throughout Europe and eighteen or nineteen lines per page. Hand B is found on folios 19r through 26 and folios 124 through 128. Hand B has a somewhat greater tendency to use minuscule (lower-case letters), and uses red, purple, and black ink, and a variable number of lines per page. Hand C is found throughout the majority of the text. Hand C also has greater tendency to use minuscule than Hand A. Hand C uses the same brownish gall-ink used by hand A, and wrote, almost always, seventeen lines per page.

The Book of Kells is the high point of a group of manuscripts produced from the late 6th century through the early 9th century in monasteries in Ireland, Scotland, and northern England, and in continental monasteries associated with Irish or English foundations. These manuscripts include the Cathach of St. Columba, the Ambrosiana Orosius, a fragmentary gospel in the Durham cathedral library (all from the early 7th century), and the Book of Durrow (from the second half of the 7th century). From the early 8th century come the Durham Gospels, the Echternach Gospels, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Lichfield Gospels. The St. Gall Gospel Book and the Macregal Gospels come from the late 8th century. The Book of Armagh (dated to 807-809), the Turin Gospel Book Fragment, the Leiden Priscian, the St. Gall Priscian, and the Macdurnan Gospel all date from the early 9th century. These manuscripts, and others, show similarities in artistic style, script, and textual traditions that allow scholars to place them together. The fully developed style of the ornamentation of the Book of Kells places it late in this series, either from the late eighth or early ninth century. The Book of Kells follows many of the iconographic and stylistic traditions found in these earlier manuscripts. For example, the form of the decorated letters found in the incipit pages for the Gospels is surprisingly consistent in Insular Gospels. Compare, for example, the incipit pages to Gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

The work has no contemporary rival for its artistic design and lavish calligraphy. Only two pages of the 678 page text lack illustrations. A masterpiece of Celtic Art, the work exemplifies the ecclesiastical, mystical, and artistic imagination of this culture. Ian Finaly in his work Celtic Art: An Introduction writes on p. 146: "it [the Book of Kells] is a revelation of the marriage of pagan superstition and Christian belief, quite as spiritually significant as Michelangelo's great manifestation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel." Byzantine, Arabic, and Asian influences combine with Irish tradition to produce a work of intricacy and detail. Human figures, abstract designs, and animals comprise the symbols used by the artists. In many cases, animal figures are manipulated and stylized to form letters.

Notes

[1] An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration or illustration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniatures. In the strictest definition of the term, an illuminated manuscript only refers to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver. However, in both common usage and modern scholarship, the term is now used to refer to any decorated manuscript.

[2] Insular script is a system of writing used in Ireland and Britain (Latin: insula, "island"). It later spread to Continental Europe in centres under the influence of Celtic Christianity. The script developed in Ireland in the 7th century and was used as late as the 19th century, though its most flourishing period fell between 600 and 850. Works written in Insular scripts commonly use large initial letters surrounded by red ink dots (although this is also true of other scripts written in Ireland and England). Letters often gradually diminish in size as they are written across a line or a page, called "diminuendo" and often marking the start of a paragraph or section; and letters with ascenders (b, d, h, l, etc.) are written with triangular or wedge-shaped tops. The bows of letters such as b, d, p, and q are very wide. The script uses many ligatures [3]and has many unique scribal abbreviations, along with many borrowings from Tironian notes [4].

[3] In writing, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. Generally, ligatures replace characters that occur next to each other when they share common components.

[4] Tironian notes (notae Tironianae) is a system of shorthand said to have been invented by Cicero's scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro.
Its first use is reported by Plutarch to be 63 B.C., when Tiro noted a speech of Cato the younger against Catiline. Tiro's system consisted of about 4,000 signs, somewhat extended in Roman times to 5,000 signs. In the darly European period, Tironian notes were taught in monasteries and the system was extended to about 13,000 signs. The use of Tironian notes declined after 1100 but some use can still be seen for the 17th century.

Sources:
    Power, Thomas. "The Magnificent Book of Kells." The third Milham Lecture delivered in April 1990, University of New Brunswick. http://www.lib.unb.ca/archives/kells/kellsweb.html.
    "Book of Kells." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells.
    "Illuminated manuscript." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript.
    "Insular script." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_majuscule.
    "Ligature (typography)." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typography%29.
    "Tironian notes." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes.

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This page was last updated August 11, 2007.