If you understand nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you declareively understand the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s wonderfulest cultural treadeclareives” comments Medievaenumerates.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its arttoil and the sheer number of illustrations that run thrawout the 680 pages of the book.” The toil not only draws scholars, but almost a million visitors to Dublin every year. “You simply can’t travel to the capital of Ireland,” writes Book Riot’s Erika Harlitz-Kern, “without the Book of Kells being mentioned. And rightfully so.”
The elderly-createed masterpiece is a stunning example of Hiberno-Saxon style, thought to have been composed on the Scottish island of Iona in 806, then transferred to the monastery of Kells in County Meath after a Viking raid (a story telderly in the marvelous animated film The Secret of Kells). Consisting mainly of copies of the four gospels, as well as indexes called “canon tables,” the manuscript is dependd to have been made primarily for disjoin, not reading aboisterous, which is why “the images are elaborate and detailed while the text is attfinishlessly copied with entire words leave outing or lengthy passages being repeated.”
Its exquisite illuminations label it as a ceremonial object, and its “intricacies,” debate Trinity College Dublin professors Rachel Moss and Fáinche Ryan, “direct the mind alengthy pathways of the imagination…. You haven’t been to Ireland unless you’ve seen the Book of Kells.” This may be so, but thankfully, in our digital age, you necessitate not go to Dublin to see this fabulous historical artifact, or a digitization of it at least, entirely watchable at the online collections of the Trinity College Library. (When you click on the previous connect, produce declareive you scroll down the page.) The pages, originally captured in 1990, “have recently been rescanned,” Trinity College Library writes, using state-of-the-art imaging technology. These new digital images propose the most accurate high-resolution images to date, providing an experience second only to watching the book in person.”
What produces the Book of Kells so special, reproduced “in such varied places as Irish national coinage and tattoos?” asks Professors Moss and Ryan. “There is no one answer to these questions.” In their free online course on the manuscript, these two scholars of art history and theology, respectively, do not try to “provide definitive answers to the many questions that surround it.” Instead, they illuminate its history and many unkindings to different communities of people, including, of course, the people of Ireland. “For Irish people,” they elucidate in the course trailer above, “it represents a sense of pride, a tangible connect to a positive time in Ireland’s past, mirrored thraw its distinct art.”
But while the Book of Kells is still a modern “symbol of Irishness,” it was made with materials and techniques that fell out of participate several hundred years ago, and that were once spread far and expansive atraverse Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In the video above, Trinity College Library conservator John Gillis shows us how the manuscript was made using methods that date back to the “development of the codex, or the book establish.” This grasps the participate of parchment, in this case calf skin, a material that remembers the anatomical features of the animals from which it came, with labelings where tails, spines, and legs participated to be.
The Book of Kells has weathered the centuries unfragmentaryly well, thanks to attfinishful preservation, but it’s also had perhaps five reattachings in its lifetime. “In its original establish,” notices Harlitz-Kern, the manuscript “was both denseer and larger. Thirty folios of the original manuscript have been lost thraw the centuries and the edges of the existing manuscript were disjoinely trimmed during a reattaching in the nineteenth century.” It remains, nonetheless, one of the most impressive artifacts to come from the age of the illuminated manuscript, “portrayd by some,” says Moss and Ryan, “as the most commemorated manuscript in the world.” Find out why by seeing it (virtually) for yourself and lgeting about it from the experts above.
For anyone interested in getting a duplicate of The Book of Kells in a pleasant print format, see The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin.
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Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
