In a celebrated passage in his account of Ireland just after the
Norman invasion in the 12th Century, the Welsh scholar Gerald de Barri
(known later as Giraldus Cambrensis) described a illuminated Irish book
which he saw in the shrine at Kildare. It was, Gerald claimed, written at the dictation of an angel during the lifetime of St Brigid – adding that it contained a concordance of the four Gospels according to St Jerome (who died in 420 AD).
If you looked carefully at the innumerable drawings “you might judge them mere daubs” but looking closely one sees they are careful compositions. “You will see nothing subtle where everything is subtle.”
The delicate intricacy of the illuminations fascinated him.
His words might almost be an appreciation of the Book of Kells, for he concluded: “All these things must have been the work, not of men, but of angels.”
But like the Book of Kells that survives, it was the work of men, but men with very special skills and a very special faith.
Mysteries
In this magnificent new account of the Book of Kells, Dr Bernard Meehan, the Keeper of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Trinity College, who is the actual guardian of the book, explores the creation, make-up and intriguing mysteries of the book for the modern reader.
He rightly points out that the book has become for many a symbol of our rich national culture.
His text is the result of 30 years of personal study and makes available in a most accessible, but still richly authoritative way, the results of 160 years of research and speculation about this book.
He unlocks many mysteries, but also leaves many more for future investigators.
Some years ago the same publishers issued a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells, which had a great success. This new book is something different, a structured guide to the making and nature of the book.
He deals first with the historical background where and how the book was created.
Then with the later history of the manuscript so far as it is known down to its arrival in Trinity in the 1650s.
He deals briefly with the way in which it was bound and later rebound, and the additions made on the pages in the way of comments and records.
Decorations
However, the heart of the book is in three sections dealing the decorations on the text pages and with the illustrations. He then turns to the scribes who wrote out the text and the artists who illuminated it.
A technical section, no less fascinating, deals with the vellum, the tools used, the pigment and inks, and how the decorations themselves were conceived and executed.
The book’s original binding is unknown, though we know it was encased in a book shrine at Kells, for this was stolen and stripped by thieves.
A final section deals with the kinds of illuminated book that would have gone before and with parallels in other cultures.
Finally he charts of the structure of the book, including the layout of the vellum sheets and the missing pages.
So altogether this is just what the ordinary reader requires, for throughout the book Dr Meehan, while being never less that exact and scholarly, writes with a clarity and lack of jargon that is very refreshing.
Great treasure
The half a million visitors a year to the present ‘shrine of the book’ in the Old Library at Trinity College come to see a great treasure of medieval insular culture.
They are attracted by the art of the book.
The text is a version of St Jerome’s Latin translation with some passages from the earlier Latin version which his displaced.
The mysteries of the text are not central to this new treatment.
However, for the men who made the book, the art was not the central thing at all.
Through the illuminations, and the book case in which it was kept, they were creating a frame or shrine for the Gospels, for the ‘good news’ of salvation, which for the monks was the most important fact in history.
Unfinished
The book seems to have been created at Iona, about 800 AD, just as the Norse pressure was building up. Fearing raids the relics of Columcille and other treasures were moved, some to Dunkeld in Perth, others to Kells.
The book is in fact unfinished, suggesting the creators were disrupted.
How did they work?
The text was written out first, by several hands, in a beautiful magisterial script. When that was done, the illuminations were added according to a pre-planned schema.
Dr Meehan devotes some time to discussing how long the work took.
Irish calligraphers and a Japanese artist attempt to copy individual pages.
Calligrapher Timothy O’Neill thought it would take some 60 days to copy the text; the Japanese artist, however, found many exhausting hours had to be devoted to merely copying the illuminations.
Conception
But beyond these calculations, it should not be overlooked that the preparing of a book, the conception, the design of pages, the trial pieces on wooden boards or pieces of bone, would have take just as long perhaps.
Dr Meehan does not pursue this angle, but his couple of years for the making of the book might well be extended by another whole year.
To supply the vellum the calves of a large herd would have been needed, some 1,200 beasts it is calculated.
Oddly Dr Meehan sees these as coming from the herds belonging to monastic settlements.
But one might image that in fact the local kings and grazier barons (who would have existed in early Christian Ireland as much as today), would have been only too pleased to supply the hides, from motives of piety or self-interest, so ensuring a ready supply in a shorter time than is suggested here.
Illuminations
The illuminations are of several kinds, from the great carpet pages and set pieces, down to smaller designs and figures.
One of the oddest is a naked warrior (half his body dyed blue with woad perhaps), flouting a spear and target, whose very human nakedness contrasts with the sacred text around him.
Clearly the early Irish did not have the same reservations about nudity that their descendants have.
The nature of the decorations in the book, the complex interlacing and the treatment of the figures, twisting and contorting them, has in the past led to much discussion about the nature of the ‘Celtic imagination’.
James Joyce, for instance, owned an earlier facsimile of the book and many critics have pursed the parallels with Finnegans Wake and with the sort of linguistic playfulness one finds in so many early Irish texts, and in modern writers like Flann O’Brien, Austin Clarke or Mairtín Ó Cadhain.
Dr Meehan by contrast emphasises the roots of the art in the Book of Kells in classical and Mediterranean culture, in the art of the late Roman Empire and just after.
The parallels with Northern art are hardly alluded to. This makes the book, as a work of art, more a part of the emerging European Romanesque tradition.
And yet, by contrast, he remarks on what could be anti-Petrine elements in some of the designs, satirical images which might seem to have an ‘anti-papal’ flavour.
This, of course, would be in keeping with the differences which were distinct between Celtic Christianity and the norms in the countries of the old Roman Empire.
Deeper divisions
The dating of Easter and the method of tonsure were symbolic of deeper divisions. But quite how this insular separateness suggested by the satirical touches agrees with the continental roots of the art is something which might have been given more discussion.
If relating the illuminations of the Book of Kells to continental styles removes some of exoticism of the book in the popular mind, the current investigations of the pigments used by the artists, also does.
It has long been thought, since the investigations of Françoise Henry in the 1930s, that the blue of the illuminations derived from lapis lazuli, which then had only one source, in the distant highlands of Afghanistan in central Asia.
It was the blue used widely, for instance, in Byzantine art.
However, the latest high-powered spectroscopic analyses by Susie Bioletti of TCD, shows that it is not present at all.
The blues come from woad and indigo, which would have been found in Ireland.
Arrest of Jesus
Though recent research has cast light on many aspects of the book, there are other features which remain mysterious.
For instance an image long thought of as the arrest of Jesus, is now seen as being a representation of Jesus on the Mount of Olives.
The image is decorated with olive branches.
Given that St Columcille was the author of a book about he Holy Places, based on what he had learned directly from a pilgrim, it might be that the community at Iona had a special interest in and knowledge of such local Palestinian details.
But one wonder about the emblematic peacocks that appear also: were these birds at all common in early Ireland?
Or were the artists working here, as perhaps elsewhere from animal images in bestiaries or other books they had to hand?
I have always thought that one of the most remarkable full pages is the image of Jesus on the roof of the Temple being tempted by Satan to cast himself off to let angels bear him up, in which the demon is painted in soot black.
The Temple is represented by an image of a wooden Irish church, giving us today a vivid peep into the immediate world of Early Christian Ireland.
Irish midlands
Though the book today is thought of as ‘the Book of Kells’ — leading to claims it ought to be displayed in Kells — for most of its history it was called the Great Book of Columcille.
Its true association is with the monastery in exile on Iona, rather with the Irish midlands.
It was created then not in a central position within the insular tradition, but on the margin, or rather the leading edge, where the great Irish colonial adventure in western Scotland confronted the Picts.
Was it at first intended to show forth the glory of the divine word, and the political power of the Irish invaders, to a pagan people already in retreat.
Though the Picts would make a rally and drove back the Irish for a time, their culture was doomed to extinction at the hands of the Irish. So this book has an aspect of colonial imperium to its creation that is suggestive of further investigation.
How was the book used?
It cannot only have been used at the celebration of the Eucharist, though its images are filled with Eucharistic allusions, as Dr Meehan thoroughly explores.
Perhaps a clue might be found, I would suggest, in the customs of Coptic Ethiopia, a Christian country like Ireland beyond the boundaries of the Roman world.
There the creation and use of illuminated books is still a living tradition.
On high days and holy days the illuminated Gospels and saints’ lives are displayed in public by the priests with an appropriate page opened for the pious to venerate — perhaps Gerald de Barri witnessed something akin to this.
Detail
With a book of this length, so rich in detail, it is difficult to refer in a short review to all the interesting observations and insights which Dr Meehan’s scholarship brings to the reader’s attention.
This will be for ordinary readers the essential work on the Book of Kells for the foreseeable future. Certainly reading him will enlighten all those vast numbers who flock to see the book in Trinity.
But they might also turn aside to visit the Treasury in the National Museum, where other objects, such as the Ardagh Chalice, the Derrynaflan chalice and paten, the Faddenmore psalter, all from the same general period of our island’s past, are displayed.
They too might be seen as “the work of angels”.
* The Book of Kells, by Dr Bernard Meehan (Thames & Hudson, €75.00 / £60.00)