These pages come from one of the few surviving Gospel books made by missionary monks in England and Ireland between the 7th and 9th centuries. The opening words of the Gospel of St John, In principio erat verbum (In the beginning was the Word), are transformed into a decorative design with motifs that were developed in ancient stone and metal work before their application to the Christian sacred book.
Listen to the history behind the decorative patterns and text of this manuscript, which include a medieval spelling mistake!
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This audio tour is narrated by the curator of The Medieval Imagination, Professor Emeritus Margaret Manion AO. Margaret’s specialist area of research is medieval and Renaissance art history and she has published a substantial number of books and articles, especially on illuminated manuscripts.
Illustration
Gospels of St Luke and St John (detail), England, Northumbria, early 8th century, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 197B, fols. 1v-2 (cat. no. 1)
Transcript
Welcome
Welcome to the State Library of Victoria and to the exhibition The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand. My name is Margaret Manion, the curator of the exhibition. As you walk around the gallery, I’ll talk about 10 of the works on display. Just press ‘Pause’ if you need more time to look at an item before moving onto the next.
Item number 1: Gospels of St Luke and St John
Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Gospel books were the first manuscripts in which the opening, or incipit, pages were completely decorated with display script; that is, the ornate shapes and sizes of the initials and letters are so arranged that they can be read as both text and visual design.
The opening words of St John’s Gospel in this 8th-century Northumbrian manuscript provide the key to this approach. The evangelist speaks of Christ as the creative Word, who proceeds from the Father whom he mirrors: ‘In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God’. Scholars are agreed that this identification of Christ as the Word, or Logos – a term borrowed from Greek philosophy – inspired the fusion of text and illumination in the early Gospel book.
Not only are the initials filled with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon decorative patterns used for centuries in pagan stone and metalwork, but the letters are also an exotic mix of Roman, Runic and Greek forms. The second ‘p’, for example, in the word Principio is a Greek ∏, still used today in mathematics. Surprisingly, this elaborately rendered text has a mistake. It should read ‘In Principio erat Verbum’ (In the beginning was the Word); but the artist-scribe has written ‘Er et’ instead of ‘erat’ (the Latin ‘was’), possibly looking ahead to the next phrase: ‘et Verbum’ (‘and the Word’).
Ornamenting the text with initials and line endings became part of the tradition of book illumination from this period on.
Download Item 1: Gospels of St Luke and St John [mp3
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