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The Book of Kells (less widely known as The Book of Columba) is an ornately illustrated Gospel Book, produced by Celtic monks in about 800 A.D. It is one of the most lavish illuminated manuscripts to survive the medieval period. Because of its technical brilliance and great beauty, it is considered by many scholars to be one of the most important works in the history of medieval art. It contains the four gospels of the Bible in a Latin translation based on the Vulgate, along with prefatory and explanatory matter, all decorated with numerous colourful illustrations and illuminations. Today it is on permanent display at the Trinity College Library in Dublin (MS 58).
The Book of Kells is the high point of a group 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 Bobbio 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 (see illustration at right), 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 List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts.)
The name "Book of Kells" is derived from the Abbey of Kells in Kells, County Meath in Ireland, where it was kept for much of the medieval period. The Abbey of Kells was founded in the early ninth century, at the time of the Viking invasions, by monks from the monastery at Iona (off the Western coast of Scotland). Iona, which had been a missionary centre for the Columban community, had been founded by St. Columba in the middle of the 6th century. When repeated Viking raids made Iona too dangerous, the majority of the community removed to Kells, which became the centre of the Columban community.
The date and place of production of the manuscript has been the subject of considerable debate. Traditionally the book was thought to have been created in the time of Saint Columba (also known as St. Columcille), possibly even the work of his hands. It is generally accepted that this tradition is false based on paleographic grounds. (That is to say, the style of script in which the book is written did not develop until well after the life of Columba.)
There are at least five competing theories about the place of origin for the manuscript. First the book may have been written in Iona and brought to Kells, in its current, incomplete state and never finished. Second, the book may have been begun at Iona and brought to Kells where it was brought to its current, incomplete state. Third, the manuscript may have been produced in the scriptorium at Kells. Fourth, it may have been produced in the north of England, perhaps at Lindisfarne, and brought to Iona and from there to Kells. Finally, it may have been the product of an unknown monastery in Scotland. Although the question of the exact location of the book's production will probably never be answered conclusively, the second theory, that it was begun at Iona and finished at Kells, is currently the most widely accepted. Regardless of which theory is true, it is certain that Kells was produced by Columban monks closely associated with the community at Iona.
Wherever it was made, the Book of Kells was at definitely at Kells by the 12th century and almost certainly by the early 11th century. An entry in the Annals of Ulster for 1006 records that "the great Gospel of Columkille, the chief relic of the Western World, was wickedly stolen during the night from the western sacristy of the great stone church at Cenannas on account of its wrought shrine". (Cenannas was the medieval Irish name for Kells.) The manuscript was recovered a few months later - minus its golden and bejeweled cover - a few months later from "under a sod." If one assumes, as is generally assumed, that this manuscript is the Book of Kells, then the early eleventh century is the earliest date for the location of the manuscript. The force of ripping the manuscript free from its cover may account for the folios missing from the beginning and end of the Book of Kells.
In the 12th century land charters pertaining to the Abbey of Kells were copied into some of the book's blank pages, giving the earliest confirmed date for manuscript's presence at Kells. (The copying of charters into important books such as the Book of Kells was a wide-spread medieval practice.)
The 12th century writer, Gerald of Wales, in his Topographia Hibernica, described, in a famous passage, seeing a great Gospel Book in Kildare which many have since assumed was the Book of Kells. The description certainly matches Kells:
This book contains the harmony of the four Evangelists according to Jerome, where for almost every page there are different designs, distinguished by varied colours. Here you may see the face of majesty, divinely drawn, here the mystic symbols of the Evangelists, each with wings, now six, now four, now two; here the eagle, there the calf, here the man and there the lion, and other forms almost infinite. Look at them superficially with the ordinary glance, and you would think it is an erasure, and not tracery. Fine craftsmanship is all about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and so subtle, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this was the work of an angel, and not of a man.
Since Gerald claims to have seen his book in Kildare, he may have seen another, now lost, book equal in quality to the Book of Kells, or he may have been confused as to his location when seeing Kells.
The Abbey of Kells was dissolved due to the ecclesiastical reforms of the 12th century. The abbey church was converted to a parish church in which the Book of Kells remained.
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. The book was presented to Trinity College in Dublin in 1661 by Henry Jones, who was to become bishop of Meath after the Restoration. Except for short periods of time, when the book has been 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 which 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.
In 2000, the volume containing the Gospel of Mark was sent to Canberra, Australia for an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts. This was only the fourth time the Book of Kells had been sent abroad for exhibition. Unfortunately, the volume suffered what has been called "minor pigment damage" while in route to Canberra. It is thought that the vibrations from the airplane's engines during the long flight may have caused the damage.
In 1951, the Swiss publisher, Urs Graf-verlag Bern, produced a facsimile. The majority of the pages were reproduced in black and white photographs. There were, however, forty-eight pages reproduced in color, including all of the full page decorations.
In 1979, another Swiss publisher, Faksimile verlag Luzern requested permission to produce a full color facsimile of the book. Permission was initially denied because Trinity College officials felt that the risk of damage to the book was too high. In 1986, after developing a process which used gentle suction to straighten a page so that it could be photographed without touching it, the publisher was given permission to produce a facsimile edition. After each page was photographed, a single page facsimile was prepared and the colours were carefully compared to the original and adjustments were made where necessary. The facsimile was published in 1990 in two volumes, the facsimile and a volume of commentary by prominent scholars. One copy is held by the Anglican Church in Kells, on the site of the original monastery. A CD-ROM version containing scanned versions of all pages along with additional information is also available.
The Book of Kells contains the four gospels of the Christian scriptures written in black, red, purple and yellow ink in an insular majuscule script, preceded by prefaces, summaries, and concordances of gospel passages. Today it consists of 340 vellum folios; it is believed that some 30 folios have been lost. (When it was examined by Ussher in 1621 there were 344 folios.) The remaining folios are gathered into 38 quires. There are between four and twelve folios per quire (two to six bifolia). Ten folios per quire is common. Some folios were single sheets. The important decorated pages of ten occurred on single sheets. The folios were 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 toe 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 and was perhaps lost when the book was stolen in the early 11th century. 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. It is probable that, like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Books of Durrow and Armagh, part of the lost preliminary material included the letter of Jerome to Pope Damasus I known as Novum opus, in which Jerome explains the purpose of his translation. It is also possible, though less likely, that the lost material included the letter of Eusebius, known as Plures fuisse, in which he explains the use of the canon tables. (Of all the insular gospels, only Lindisfarne contains this letter.)
The two fragments of the lists of Hebrew names occur on the recto of the first surviving folio and 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 first list fragment is followed by the canon tables of Eusebius Caesarea. These tables, which predate the text of the Vulgate, were developed to cross reference the gospels. Eusebius divided the Gospel into chapters and then created tables which allowed readers where a given episode in the life of Christ was located in each of the Gospels. The canon tables were traditionally included in the prefatory material in most medieval copies of the Vulgate text of the Gospels. The tables in the Book of Kells, however, are almost unusable because the scribe condensed the tables into in such a way as to make them confused. In addition, the corresponding chapter numbers were never inserted into the margins of the text, making it impossible to find the sections to which the canon tables refer. The reason these chapter numbers were never inserted is uncertain. It may have been planned to insert them when the decoration was completed, but since the decoration was never completed, they were never inserted. It also may be that it was decided to leave them out so as not to mar the appearance of pages.
The Breves causae and the Argumenta 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 also 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 harmonize 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 and Argumenta for Mark, then, quite oddly, 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 Book of Kells contains the text of the four gospels based on the Vulgate. It, however, does not contain a pure copy of the Vulgate. There are numerous variants from the Vulgate, where Old Latin translations are used rather than Jerome's text. There does not seem to be a consistent pattern of variation amongst 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 manuscript is written in Insular majuscule, with some minuscule letters usually "c" and "s". The text is usually written in one long line across the page. Francoise Henry has identified at least three scribes in this manuscript, who he 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 the west 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 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 text is accompanied by incredibly intricate full pages of artwork, with smaller painted decorations appearing throughout the text itself. The book has a broad palette of colors with purple, lilac, red, pink, green, yellow being the colors most often used. (The illustrations in the Book of Durrow, by contrast, use only four colors.) Surprisingly, given the lavish nature of the work, there was no use of gold or silver leaf in the manuscript. The pigments used for the illustrations had to be imported from all over Europe; the immensely expensive blue lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan.
The lavish illumination program is far greater than any other surviving insular gospel book. There are three surviving full page miniatures of the four evangelist symbols, one each before the opening of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John (folios 27v, 129v, and 290v). Directly facing the opening texts of Matthew and John are full page portraits of the evangelists (folios 28v and 291v, see portrait of John at left). It can be assumed that the evangelist symbol page for Luke and the portraits of Mark and Luke at one time existed, but have been lost. There are also four full page miniatures, illustrating particular points of the text. One, an iconic image of the Virgin and Child (folio 7v) occurs in the prefatory matter. This miniature is the first representation of the Virgin in a western manuscript. The other three, which occur in the main text, are a portrait of Christ in Majesty (folio 32v), the Arrest of Christ (folio 114r) and the Temptation of Christ (folio 202v). It is probable that other full page miniatures have been lost. Facing the miniature of Christ in Majesty is the book's only carpet page, a full page covered with geometrical patterns.
In addition to the full page miniatures, the text itself was often illuminated, and, in effect, turned into carpet pages. The opening verses of each of the gospels have been given this treatment. These full page decorated verses face, in Matthew and John the evangelist portraits, and presumably would have faced the now lost portraits of Mark and Luke. The decoration of these texts is so elaborate that the text itself is almost illegible. The opening page (folio 28r) of Matthew may stand as an example. (See illustration at right.) The page consists of only two words Liber generationis ("The book of the generation"). The "lib" of Liber is turned in to a giant monogram which dominates the entire page. The "er" of Liber is presented as interlaced ornament within the "b" of the "lib" monogram. Generationis is broken into three lines and contained within an elaborate frame in the right lower quadrant of the page. The entire assemblage is contained within an elaborate border. The border and the letters themselves are further decorated with elaborate spirals and knotwork, many of them zoomorphic. The opening words of Mark, Initium evangelii ("The beginning of the gospel"), Luke, Quoniam quidem multi, and John In principio erat verbum ("In the beginning was the Word") are all given similar treatments.
In addition to the opening texts of each of the gospels, the verses associated with each of the full page miniatures have been given an elaborate treatment. Facing the miniature of the Virgin and Child are the opening words of the Breves causae of Matthew, Nativitas Christi in Bethlem, which are given a full page treatment. (The Breves causae are brief summaries of the gospels found in the introductory matter of many of the insular gospel books.) The miniature of the Arrest of Christ is on the recto of folio 114. On that folio's verso is the text Tunc dicit illis ("Then He said these things"), the opening words Matthew's account of the arrest of Christ. Facing the miniature of the Temptation of Christ are the opening words of Luke 4:1, Iesus autem plenus. These words are also given a full page illumination and are the beginning of the account of Christ's temptation in the wilderness.
Of special interest is the page known as the Chi Rho monogram, the most elaborate illumination of the medieval period (see illustration at right). The Chi Rho monogram follows the miniature of Christ in Majesty and the Carpet Page. The Greek letters "Chi" and "Rho" were often used in medieval manuscripts to abbreviate the word "Christ" or to represent he name "Jesus". The Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy of Christ. The actual beginning of the story of Christ started at this point and was seen as an appropriate point for embellishment, and was enlarged in decorated in insular Gospel Books. The Chi Rho page in the Book of Kells is the largest and most lavish extant Chi Rho monogram and is the culmination of a tradition that started with the Book of Durrow.
Several other texts are also given elaborate treatment, even though there is no surviving miniature associated with them. These texts mark off major events in Christ's life including His birth (in Luke), crucifixion (in Matthew and Mark), resurrection (in Luke), and ascension (in Mark). It is probable that these texts also had associated miniatures.
The decoration of the book is not limited to the major pages. Indeed all but two pages have at least some decoration. Scattered through the text are decorated initials and small figures of animals and humans often twisted and tied into complicated knots. Many significant texts, such as the Pater Noster have decorated initials. Many of the small animals serve to mark a "turn-in-the-path" (that is, a place where a line is finished in a space above or below the line). Many other animals serve to fill spaces left at the end of lines. No two of these designs are the same. No earlier surviving manuscript has this massive amount of decoration.
The decorations are all of high quality. The complexity of these designs is often breath-taking. In one decoration, which occupies one inch square piece of a page, it is possible to count as many as 158 complex interlacements of white ribbon with a black border on either side. Some decorations can only be fully appreciated with magnifying glasses, although glasses of the required power were not available until hundreds of years after the book's completion. The complicated knotwork and interweaving found in Kells and related manuscripts have many parallels in the metalwork and stone carving of the period. These design have also had an enduring popularity. Indeed many of these motifs are used today in popular art including jewelry and tattoos.
It is likely that the book had a sacramental, rather than educational purpose. A large, lavish Gospel Book, such as the Book of Kells would have been left on the high altar of the church, and taken off only for the "reading" of the Gospel during Mass. However, it is probable that the reader would not actually read the text from the book, but rather recite from memory. It is significant that the Chronicles of Ulster state that the book was stolen from the sacristy (where the vessels and other accruements of the mass were stored) rather than from the monastic library. The design of the book seems to take this purpose in mind, that is the book was produced to look good rather than be useful. There are numerous uncorrected mistakes in the text. Lines were often completed in a blank space in the line above. The chapter headings that were necessary to make the canon tables usable were not inserted into the margins of the page. In general, nothing was done to the disrupt the aesthetic look of the page: aesthetics were given a priority over utility.
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