19 January 2021
Merovingian illumination in a manuscript of Gregory's Moralia
The British Library holds one of the earliest surviving copies of Pope Gregory the Great’s (d. 604) Moralia in Job, a highly influential commentary on the Old Testament book of Job. It was made only about a century after St Gregory’s death, possibly in Laon during a period of Merovingian rule. The Merovingians were a dynasty that ruled over the Franks in the territory similar to Roman Gaul from the time of Merovech (or Merovich), by tradition the father of Childeric I (d. 481) and grandfather of Clovis I (d. 511).
The decoration of Merovingian manuscripts is distinctive. It features a limited palette of brown, green and yellow, and the use of zoomorphic initials (as the name suggests, where animals form all or part of the letter). Some letters, such as ‘I’ are formed of just one animal, like the fish of ‘I’(nter) (among) at the beginning of the first book, while other letters are more composite. The beginning of the third book of the commentary is a letter ‘B’ for Beatus Iob (blessed Job), made up of a fish and two birds.
Another characteristic feature of these manuscripts is the display script – enlarged coloured letters typically used to delineate important divisions, such as the beginning of new sections of text. The first book of the text begins with a heading ‘In expositione Beati Iob’ (An Exposition of the Blessed Job). Similarly, the beginning of the third book (incipit liber [tertius]) is announced in capital letters of alternating colours.
Something of the way in which these manuscripts were made is revealed by the letter and display script at the beginning of the fourth book: ‘Q’(ui) (who), formed of two facing birds and a fish, and ‘Incipit liber quartus’ (beginning of the fourth book). Both are carefully drawn in ink but left without any added colours. This suggests that the writing and drawing were done first and the colours were added later, but in this case not completed.
You can read more about Gregory the Great in our article on the works of the Church Fathers, and find out more about Merovingian art in our article on French manuscript illumination, both on the Polonsky Foundation England and France Project website.
Kathleen Doyle
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13 January 2021
Over 4,500 manuscripts now online
Long-term readers of our blog may know that we periodically publish lists of our digitised manuscripts, the last of which was published in July 2020. With the arrival of the New Year and the beginning of a new lockdown in the UK, we are releasing an update to our lists of manuscript hyperlinks. We hope this makes it easier for readers and researchers to explore our amazing digitised treasures online.
There are now over 4,500 Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern manuscripts on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website. Here is a full list of all the items currently available, as of January 2021:
PDF: Full-list-digitised-mss-jan-2021
Excel: Full-list-digitised-mss-jan-2021 (this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers).
During this period of terrible uncertainty, the Library's Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern team has been busy as ever, working to make more manuscripts available for our readers online. Over the last 6 months alone, we have published over 850 items, from medieval and early modern codices and rolls to Greek papyri and ostraca. All the images featured in this blogpost are from collection items that we have digitised since June 2020. Here is a list of our most recent additions:
PDF: Digitised_mss_july2020_jan_2021
Excel: Digitised_mss_july2020_jan_2021(this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers).
Over the last months, some 620 Greek papyri have been published online, spanning from the 3rd century BC to the early 8th century. These include pieces of Greek literature, such as the famous ‘Harris Homer Codex’, an 1800-year-old manuscript preserving portions of Homer’s Iliad, as well as hundreds of fascinating documents, such as letters of parents to their children, managers and employees, magical charms and shopping lists. You can view this video for a short introduction to cataloguing the Greek papyri.
Thanks to a collaboration with the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, more than 250 inscribed pottery sherds (ostraca) from the 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD are now available online for the first time. A short overview is presented in our previous blogpost on ostraca.
In September, we reported on the progress of a major digitisation programme, Heritage Made Digital: Tudor and Stuart manuscripts. This collaborative project, involving teams across the British Library, intends to publish approximately 600 Tudor and Stuart manuscripts online. The selection encompasses original letters by members of the Elizabethan court; literary manuscripts of the works of important Elizabeth and Jacobean poets such as John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney; notes by the alchemist and astronomer John Dee; and collections of state papers that highlight numerous aspects of the political and social history of this period, particularly the relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. As of the start of this year, over a quarter of these manuscripts have now been published.
Since this summer, two particularly significant manuscripts have been digitised, both of which can be explored in their entirety on the British Library’s new Universal Viewer. The Sherborne Missal, acquired by the British Library in 1998, has been called the ‘unrivalled masterpiece of English book production in the fifteenth century' (Kathleen Scott), with each of its hundreds of pages replete with astonishing illumination. Readers can learn more about the Sherborne Missal in our previous blogpost. The volume was also recently featured on BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures programme.
Meanwhile in November, the British Library acquired and digitised the most important surviving manuscript of the works of Lewis of Caerleon, a highly influential mathematician, theologian and astronomer, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London towards the end of the reign of Richard III (r. 1483-1485). The volume contains the most complete collection of his astronomical and mathematical works, including texts that are unattested elsewhere, as well as its original medieval binding and an unparalleled series of astronomical tables and diagrams. Learn more in our earlier blogpost on the Lewis of Caerleon manuscript.
Many images of our manuscripts are also available to view and download from our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts which is searchable by keywords, dates, scribes and languages.
Enormous thanks to all the members of staff across the Library whose hard work has made these achievements possible despite the difficult circumstances this year.
We wish all our readers a Happy New Year and hope you enjoy exploring our digitised collections!
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24 December 2020
The ox and ass at the Nativity
Picture a traditional Nativity scene. The Christ Child is at the centre with his parents, Mary and Joseph, surrounded by a host of familiar characters who played a role in the unfolding events. There are angels, shepherds, the Three Wise Men or Magi (although they can be in a separate scene of the Epiphany), the innkeeper, sometimes even midwives, and, of course the ox and the ass.
Images of the Nativity in medieval manuscripts also tend to contain some of these familiar characters. Yet after the three members of the Holy Family, the most frequently depicted are the ox and the ass. This is rather surprising as they are not mentioned in the Gospels, but they are one of the most ancient and stable elements in the iconography of the Nativity.
The earliest surviving text mentioning their presence dates from the 8th century (the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which was not included in the New Testament). However, the first known example of a Nativity scene in art, a carving on the Sarcophagus of Stilicho in Milan dated to AD 400, contains just Christ in the manger with the ox and ass on either side; Mary and Joseph are absent.
One of the oldest medieval images of the Nativity in our collections contains a friendly-looking ox and ass, watching over Jesus in a rather elaborate crib, hidden in a corner beneath Mary, who takes centre stage. The midwife and Joseph appear to the right (midwives are found most often in earlier images but gradually disappeared from the iconography). This elaborate and stylised miniature is from the Benedictional of St Æthelwold, a manuscript made in Winchester in the 10th century.
The ox and ass (or donkey) remained prominent features of Nativity scenes, often found alongside the Christ child. In this image below Christ is placed above Mary in a raised manger and the animals appear to have their noses in the manger where Jesus lies. Some commentators have interpreted this as a kind act by the animals, breathing on the baby to keep him warm, while for others the animals are feeding from the manger, referring to the passage in the Gospel of John, where Christ calls himself ‘the bread of life’ and promises eternal life to those who feed on him.
A charming domestic scene in a Book of Hours in French (below) shows Mary reading or saying her prayers, while Joseph seems to watch her in bemusement (though his head-in-hand pose may denote that he is tired or sleeping). Both seem unaware that the baby Jesus, again at some distance, apparently has his hand in the donkey’s mouth. Of the two animals, the donkey is often seen as more playful, and so perhaps he is allowing the baby to prod him, while the ox (traditionally a sacrificial animal in the Bible) was seen by early Christians as symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice, so he is often shown as the more serious of the two.
In the 14th century, St Briget of Sweden’s vision of the Nativity had a major influence on subsequent iconography. She described seeing the ox and the ass and the Virgin kneeling before a ‘glorious infant lying on the earth, naked and glowing’ with ‘ineffable light and splendour’. And so images of Christ lying naked, worshipped by Mary (and sometimes Joseph) became common in devotional manuscripts. The ox and ass are never too far away, a benevolent presence, Christ’s first playmates.
A page from the Hours of the Virgin in the Tilliot Hours contains an unusual two-part image where the ox and ass are present in both scenes. The lower image shows Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary arriving at the inn, leading a tired-looking donkey which has been carrying Mary in a saddle, followed by the ox. They are greeted by an inkeeper who in this telling of the tale is a woman. In the Nativity scene above, the ox has his nose to the manger, joining in the adoration of the Christ Child, while the donkey looks on from behind.
A picture of the two animals beside a baby in a manger is the simplest and most easily recognisable symbol of the Nativity. An example of this is a set of representations of key events in a medieval almanac. Each event is depicted with the number of years since it occurred, and, following the Ark (4308 years ago), is a simplistic drawing of an ox and ass on either side of a Christ in a crib. The animals make it obvious to the viewer that this is not just any baby, but Christ at his Nativity and so we know that the almanac was produced 1412 years after the birth of Christ, around the year 1412.
And lastly, in this rather worrying scene the Christ Child seems to be trying to leap out of the manger. The donkey is holding him back by grasping his swaddling garments with its teeth. Again, Mary and Joseph are oblivious, though the ox watches in horror.
Whether symbols, playmates, transport or babysitters, it certainly seems that the ox and the ass were useful characters at the Nativity.
Chantry Westwell
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17 November 2020
Announcing the Acquisition of the Lucas Psalter
We announce today the British Library’s acquisition of the Lucas Psalter, which was made in Bruges for an English patron in the 1480s, at a time when such luxury Flemish books were sought after by English owners.
The manuscript (now British Library, Add MS 89428) is a deluxe Psalter, including the book of the Psalms and other devotional material, such as a calendar and lists of hymns appropriate to various Sunday services throughout the liturgical year. The book has 183 folios, is of large format (305 x 205mm), and is written in a Gothic textura script, presented in two columns. This type of script was more usual in England than the bȃtarde or rotunda scripts used on the Continent. Taken together, the layout and size of the volume more generally suggest that it was intended as a lectern book rather than one for private devotion. It may originally have been intended to form part of a Breviary, which includes the texts necessary to celebrate the various services of the Divine Office throughout the day.
The manuscript was acquired by Thomas Houchon Lucas (1460-1539) of Suffolk, the secretary to Jasper Tudor and Solicitor General under Henry VII. Lucas is identified by the added arms in the manuscript of Lucas and Morieux quarterly, and of these arms impaling Kemys of Monmouthshire. This identifies the owners of the manuscript for whom these arms were added as Thomas Houchon Lucas and his wife Elizabeth Kemys (d. by August 1528) who married in 1486 (or 1489). The manuscript remained in the family and has the bookplate of Thomas Philip Earl de Grey of Wrest Park (1781-1859) inside the upper cover. Thomas Philip succeeded to the titles 2nd Earl de Grey and 6th Baron Lucas of Crudwell in 1833.
The manuscript has a contemporary 15th-century binding of red velvet over wooden boards, with metal bosses at the four corners and in the centre of both covers, and corner pieces in unusual shapes with bird head terminals. Although worn in places, the bosses have protected the velvet and accordingly much of the red velvet is remarkably well preserved given its age. The binding may have been added in London shortly after the book was produced.
We plan to digitise the manuscript and will publish a further blog with more details about the manuscript and its artist, the Master of Edward IV, when it is available on the Digitised Manuscripts website. You can read more about the manuscript in the British Library’s press release.
The Lucas Psalter was purchased by the British Library with the generous support from Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), the Bernard H. Breslauer Fund of the American Trust for the British Library and the British Library Collections Trust.
Kathleen Doyle
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12 November 2020
Ottonian imperial style in Echternach Gospel-books
After the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire, his heirs continued his policy of patronising and commissioning great works of art. The king of East Francia, Otto I (d. 973), revived Charlemagne’s title of Holy Roman Emperor in 962, and together with his son and grandson (also Ottos) gave his name to a monumental, imperial artistic style now known as Ottonian art. These emperors and their Salian successors (a subgroup of Franks from the Lower Rhine area), Conrad II (r. 1024-39), and Henry III (r. 1039-56) commissioned some of the finest illuminated Gospel-books ever made.
A small but incredibly lavish group of these manuscripts were produced at the wealthy Benedictine Abbey of St Willibrord in Echternach, in modern day Luxembourg, 16 kilometres (10 miles) from Trier. These include two manuscripts now in the British Library, one in the Harley collection (Harley MS 2821) and one in the Egerton collection (Egerton MS 608).
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Harley Echternach Gospels is their use of fictive textiles as decoration, including facing pages painted to resemble silk before the individual Gospels. In many Echternach manuscripts the patterns are monochrome or in varying shades of the same colour, and include animals familiar from Byzantine silks, often in facing or opposing pairs. In the Harley example the patterns are more colourful and centralized, and resemble the patterns of Late Antique weaving or mosaic floors.
These decorative pages may serve to make the opening of the Gospel text a more revelatory event. In this sense they may be similar to the actual silk curtains remaining in some manuscripts which can be lifted to view individual miniatures, such as those in the Arnstein Bible which we blogged about previously.
In addition to their independent use as carpet pages, the textile patterns are used as marginal decoration for the first time in the Echternach Gospel-books (Nordenfalk, Codex (1971), p. 98). This is seen, for example, in the full border around the Evangelist portrait of St Mark and the facing depiction of the Nativity.
The painting of the figures is also highly stylised, using jewel-like vibrant colours. In content they are indebted to earlier models, with some innovations. For example, according to tradition, St Mark established the Church in Alexandria and was the first bishop there; in the Harley Echternach Gospels, he wears a chasuble, or outer vestment of a bishop, and he makes a gesture of blessing. This contrasts with the more typical portraits in which the Evangelists are depicted in the act of writing out their texts.
Opposite each of the Evangelists in the Harley Echternach Gospels is a full-page scene, reflecting four important episodes arranged in chronological order: the Annunciation faces St Matthew; the Nativity, St Mark; the Crucifixion, St Luke; and the Ascension, St John. This selection may result from the contraction of a much longer narrative cycle that appears in three of the surviving Echternach Gospel-books.
The Echternach Gospel-book in the Egerton collection has been digitised recently as part of The Polonsky Foundation Medieval England and France 700-1200 project. The similarities in composition, content and style with the Harley Echternach Gospels are immediately apparent. For example, the Evangelist portrait of St Mark also depicts him seated frontally, holding a book on his lap and making a gesture of blessing. His chair features dog-head and feet terminals, and St Mark is flanked by columns and curtains, with his symbol of the lion above. Opposite, the Nativity scene parallels the two-level composition in an enclosed architectural space, with the Child and animals above St Joseph and the Virgin.
The Egerton Echternach Gospels is a slightly smaller book and doesn’t include the patterned textile margins that are so prominent a feature of the more elaborate Echternach Gospel-books. However, it retains its thick original oak binding, with a hollow in the front cover. Originally it is likely that this space was filled with an ivory or metalwork plaque, and perhaps relics, indicating the importance and status of this still lavish Gospel-book.
Kathleen Doyle
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Further reading
Carl Nordenfalk, Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis: An Echternach Gospel-Book of the Eleventh Century (Stockholm, 1971).
Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination: A Historical Study, 2nd edition (London, 1999), pp. 186-205.
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29 October 2020
Byland Abbey ghost stories: a guide to medieval ghosts
On an overcast day in October, the ruins of Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire seem just the place to meet a medieval ghost. Nestled beneath the towering crags of Sutton Bank, the crumbled walls are pensive with memories and secrets. The dramatic outline of a rose window gapes into the sky as though crying out from a past long distant but not wholly dead. Fittingly enough, it was here that a monk wrote down one of the most important collections of ghost stories to survive from medieval Europe.
The stories, twelve in total, were written in the early 15th century on the blank pages of a manuscript containing a collection of rhetorical and theological works, now British Library Royal MS 15 A XX (ff. 140v-143 and ff. 163v-164v). Despite being written in Latin, the language of the Church, the stories are mostly set among the rural communities of North Yorkshire. They are full of references to real local places, names of people and everyday details. Their clear local roots and lack of narrative structure gives them the feeling of folktales and hearsay.
A Latin edition of the stories was published by the great manuscript scholar and horror writer M.R. James in 1922, and English translations are available by A.J. Grant (1924), and Saint Anselm College (2014). But for anyone who hasn’t time to read the stories in full (or doesn’t dare), we’ve condensed the key points into this helpful guide to medieval ghosts. Perhaps it will come in handy this Halloween...
What are medieval ghosts?
The ghosts in the Byland stories are not the evil forces which seek to harm humanity in many modern horror tales. They are mostly people from the community who have died without confessing sins, righting wrongs or otherwise preparing for a ‘good death’. The ghosts cannot get to heaven until these issues have been resolved, so they rise from their graves to seek help from the living.
The sins in question tend to be relatively mundane. Story IX tells of a ghost whose crime is ‘a matter of a sixpence’. In Story VI, the ghost of a canon of Newburgh Priory is tormented for stealing silver spoons. In Story VII, a hired hand is punished for overindulging his oxen, feeding them on his master’s corn and letting them plough the land too shallowly.
The ghosts try a variety of tactics for persuading people to help. Story I tells of an enterprising ghost in the area of Rievaulx who helps carry a sack of beans in return for absolution. In Story III, the rather forlorn ghost of Robert of Kilburn wanders around the village at night, standing at windows and doors, waiting to see if anyone would come out and help. Eventually the priest hears his confession and he is able to rest in peace.
What do ghosts look like?
The Byland ghost stories include some wonderfully gruesome descriptions of the ghosts' appearances. They are clearly envisioned as decaying corpses, rather like modern zombies. In Story III, the ghost speaks not with his tongue but from the inside of his bowels, which are hollow and echoing like an empty cask. The shortest tale, Story V, tells of a man who witnesses a woman carrying a ghost on her back, when ‘he saw the hands of the woman sink deeply into the flesh of the ghost as though the flesh were rotten and not solid but phantom flesh’.
The appearance of these ghosts was clearly influenced by the art of the period. In Story II, the ghost appears ‘in the likeness of a man of great stature, horrible and thin, like one of the dead kings in pictures’—a reference to the popular imagery of the Three Living and the Three Dead Kings.
However, the Byland ghosts are also able to shape-shift and they appear in such assorted forms as: a horse, a revolving hay-cock with a light in the middle, a raven with sparks of fire shooting from its sides, a dog, a she-goat, a bullock without a mouth or eyes or ears, and a revolving piece of canvas (perhaps a precursor to the classic white sheet?).
What should you do if you meet a ghost?
The best thing to do in this situation is to talk to the ghost and find out what it wants. Ghosts aren’t able to speak to living people unless someone conjures them, which involves calling them to speak in the name of God. But if you are planning on meeting with ghosts, you may wish to bring protection. In Story II, when Snowball the tailor goes to keep an appointment with a ghost, he draws a magic circle around himself and uses an array of amulets.
The worst thing you can do if you meet a ghost is to try to resist it. Snowball the tailor finds that his attempts to repel the ghost with his sword are completely ineffectual: it just feels like he’s striking a peat-stack. In Story IX, a ghost follows a man for 80 miles, throws him over a hedge and catches him on the other side. When the man finally speaks to the ghost, it tells him ‘If you’d conjured me in the first place, I wouldn’t have hurt you’.
How do you get rid of a ghost?
The best way to get rid of a ghost is to help it out. In most of the stories, the ghosts will quietly rest in peace once their unfinished business has been resolved. However, some ghosts are more troublesome. Story IV tells of the particularly malevolent ghost of James Tankerlay, rector of Cold Kirby, who walks from his grave at night and blows out the eye of his former mistress. The monks of Byland Abbey take action by having his corpse exhumed and cast into the present-day popular wild swimming spot, Lake Gormire.
Several other stories also hint that ghosts are averse to water: in Story I, the ghost will not cross the river, and in Story II, the ghost screams at the suggestion of meeting by Hodge Beck. This trope of supernatural creatures being unable to cross water has persisted into modern literature such as Dracula and Lord of the Rings.
The Byland ghost stories give us a glimpse of the kinds of tales that were probably once widespread but were rarely written down. They reveal medieval people’s very real fear of death and the uncertainties of what lay beyond, but also a surprising compassion for the undead.
So next time you hear something go bump in the night, don’t be afraid. Chances are the ghost won’t try to throw you over a hedge or do anything more sinister—it just needs a willing ear and a helping hand.
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Further reading
For the Latin text, see:
M.R. James, 'Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories', The English Historical Review, 37 (1922), pp. 413-22.
For English translations, see:
21 October 2020
Angels in Manuscripts
Angels pop up all over the place in medieval manuscripts, from Books of Hours to handbooks on magic. They are key players in Old and New Testament stories and feature in decorative borders. Join us for a tour of some of the wonderful images of angels in British Library manuscripts and the many varied contexts in which they appear.
Angelology
An illustrated treatise by Francesc Eiximenis discusses the properties of angels, for instance ‘How an angelic spirit has no body and yet it can take on corporeal form by entering a body’ and the characteristics of good and bad angels. Each man and woman must choose between the angels’ path of goodness and the evil ways of the devil, as shown in this miniature below.
The Breviari d’Amour, an encyclopaedic work in the Catalan language with the emphasis on theological and courtly traditions, contains a section on the offices or tasks of angels, which include seeing off the devil, interceding with Christ for humanity and carrying souls to Heaven.
Angels in the Old Testament
Angels play a leading role in some of the best-known stories in both the Old and New Testaments. In Genesis, when Adam and Eve are banished from Paradise for eating the forbidden fruit, an angel with a flaming sword bars the gate to the garden and they are forced out into the world where they have to work hard for their livelihood.
In the Old Testament story of Jacob, grandson of Abraham, he has a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven with angels climbing up and down, and he hears God’s voice blessing him from above. In his old age, returning home to the land of Canaan after a long exile, he wrestles with an angel all night, remaining unbeaten, and receives a blessing, being given the name ‘Israel’. These two episodes are illustrated as part of a prefatory set of images from the Bible in the Omne Bonum, an alphabetical encyclopedia of general knowledge written by James le Palmer, Clerk of the Exchequer in c. 1360.
Angels and the Birth of Christ
The Feast of the Annunciation is one of the most important in the medieval church calendar. Pictures of the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary to announce that she will give birth to Christ are found in Books of Hours, Missals, Psalters and Bibles. A search using the term ‘Annunciation’ in the ‘Image description’ field of our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts produces 166 results, one of the earliest being the Echternach Gospels from the mid-11th century, where a full-page illumination of this scene precedes the Gospel of Matthew.
Angels sometimes appear in scenes of the Nativity, including this charming depiction of a helpful angel preparing a bath for the newborn Christ in the stable, while the baby plays with the donkey, Mary rests, and Joseph looks on with his arms crossed. This is just one example of how useful angels can be to have around.
Angels in Revelation
Angels play a key role as the agents of God’s plan for the end of the world in Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. They guide John in his vision and bring about disasters on earth: seven angels are given seven trumpets to blow, causing a series of cataclysmic events, and later, seven angels use seven censers to pour out plagues on earth.
In Revelation, a war takes place in heaven between the forces of good, led by the archangel Michael and the evil followers of the dragon, or the devil. The Tiberius Psalter from mid-11th century Winchester contains a colour outline drawing of St Michael defeating the dragon, as part of a series of scenes from the Bible.
Angels in saints lives
Two of the leading English saints, Cuthbert and Guthlac, were visited by angels, as shown in their illustrated hagiographies. According to the Venerable Bede’s account of his life, St Cuthbert, who became bishop of Lindisfarne, was visited in his youth by an angel disguised as a weary traveller. In this scene, Cuthbert has seated the traveller at his table and is washing his feet, showing Christ-like humility. Here the artist has cleverly dressed the figure in the hooded cloak of a traveller or pilgrim, but has included angels’ wings to show his true nature.
The life of Guthlac, the Mercian hermit-saint, is told in a series of roundels on a parchment roll produced in Lincolnshire in c. 1200. He builds a cell on the island of Crowland, where he is visited by an angel and St Bartholemew.
Good and Bad Angels
As Revelation shows, not all angels are benign. In the Divine Comedy, when Dante reaches paradise with Beatrice, they see the Archangels Michael and Raphael battling the bad angels (who fell from grace with Lucifer) and casting them into hell.
Beliefs about angels were not always sanctioned by the Church as they could sometimes cross over into the occult. A book of magic from the 16th century known as the Sworn Book of Honorius has a section on how to summon heavenly intermediaries so that they will impart knowledge of all things to the user. Both good and bad angels are pictured and named on this page. The images themselves were believed to have magical properties.
Good and bad, useful and militant, it's clear that angels hold an important place in medieval illumination. Explore more amazing images on our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts and Digitised Manuscripts sites.
Chantry Westwell
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06 October 2020
Early medieval interlace – a distinctive or ubiquitous feature?
Regular readers of this blog are likely familiar with splendid examples of ‘Insular’ art — the art of the islands of Britain and Ireland from the 7th to 9th centuries. The iconic Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most well-known, but you can also admire several examples on the webspace for the recent Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition.
As is clear from this initial from the Tiberius Bede, one of the main decorative elements of Insular art is the incorporation of delicately drawn interlacing knotwork designs. The inside of the letter is decorated with interlacing ribbons on a black ink background. The tongue of the beast’s head at the top of the letter also interweaves with itself. Patterns like this are still closely associated with Irish, Scottish, and Welsh cultural identity, often called ‘Celtic knotwork’.
Intricate interlace designs are also an important element of the style of manuscript art known as ‘Franco-Saxon’. ‘Franco’ refers to Francia (the kingdom of the Franks), where this style originated. The ‘Saxon’ part of the term refers to the incorporation of Insular decorative motifs (when this term was coined in the late 19th century Insular art was often called ‘Hiberno-Saxon’). In general, the Franco-Saxon style is characterised by a fusion of motifs based on Insular models and features of layout, decoration, and script of the Carolingian manuscript tradition. The Carolingian dynasty seized control over the area roughly corresponding to modern-day France from 751, expanded the kingdom, and ruled (intermittently) until 987.
Interlace is usually described as one of the most defining Insular components of the Franco-Saxon style. Interlace decoration has also been seen as evidence of the spread of this style to the scriptorium of Saint-Martin of Tours during the second half of the 9th century. The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Martin of Tours was one of the most influential centres of manuscript production in the Carolingian empire in the early decades of the century. However, in 853 Tours was attacked by one of the Norse war bands who carried out raids along the rivers of France. To help restore the Abbey’s destroyed library, books from other Carolingian centres were sent to the monks of Tours. We know that at least one of those manuscripts was a Franco-Saxon manuscript from Saint-Amand, one of the main centres of the Franco-Saxon style.
Consequently, the decoration in manuscripts made at Tours in the decades after the attack of 853 has been described as incorporating the Franco-Saxon style into the diverse and well-developed Tours style. This Gospel book from Tours, digitised as part of the Polonsky project (Add MS 11849), is one example of this. The golden ribbons that both form the outline of the ligature ‘LI’ (Liber) (book) as well as interlaced designs within the letter and at their terminals, have been compared to decorated initials in well-known Franco-Saxon manuscripts.
But there is a problem with using the presence of interlace as a distinguishing feature of an early medieval style. When you start to look at early medieval manuscripts from across northern Europe, you quickly notice that interlacing knotwork decoration is an omnipresent decorative element.
For example, in the area that is now Belgium and the Southern Netherlands, interlace in a slightly different variant was also common during this period. Here it is incorporated within the stem of the initial ‘D’ as well as in a design within the letter, in red and brown ink.
Similarly, interlace is also present in contemporary manuscripts that were most likely made in Brittany, which was never incorporated fully into the Carolingian empire. Perhaps that is why manuscript art from this area often continued to resemble Frankish manuscripts created before the spread of Carolingian influence (i.e. before c. 750).
Further south, in Northern Italy, early medieval manuscripts also feature interlace in their decorated initials. This is apparent in a late 8th-early 9th manuscript (now Cotton MS Nero A II), which has a large initial ‘D’, with its ascender swooping to the left. The letter incorporates knotwork patterns within its rounded bowl, while another interlace design of thicker ribbons continues and reaches inside the bowl.
Insular artists, responsible for creations like the Lindisfarne Gospels, undeniably mastered the basic principles of interlacing knotwork and created incredibly intricate and imaginative designs. As a type of pattern in itself, however, it was such a ubiquitous feature of early medieval European art that its presence in a manuscript does not necessarily indicate specifically Insular influence.
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Medieval manuscripts blog recent posts
- Picturing the Crucifixion
- A Tudor autograph book
- A newly-acquired manuscript of the Knights Hospitaller
- The Lindisfarne Gospels back at the British Library
- Panizzi Lectures – Drawing Conclusions: Diagrams in Medieval Art and Thought
- ‘Do you like gold? Use it!’: A golden binding by Pierre Legrain
- Gold galore in the Harley Golden Gospels
- The golden splendour of the Queen Mary Psalter
- A marvel in gold and ivory: Queen Melisende’s Psalter
- Highlights from our Gold exhibition
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