The Largest Bible Ever Made

Because Henry of Blois was Bishop of Winchester, the richest cathedral in England, and because he was known to be a patron of the arts and a donor of many valuable items to Winchester, it is assumed that it was he who ordered the creation of what is called the Winchester Bible. It was made by monks at the Winchester priory of St. Swithun.

The Winchester Bible is an enormous book (see the illustration with hands for scale) of 936 pages whose parchment was made from the hides of approximately 250 calves. The leaves are 23" by 16", making it the largest hand-made Bible. Its size demanded that it be made in two volumes, but it was re-bound in 1820 into three volumes, then again in the 21st century by the Bodleian Library in Oxford into four volumes for easier handling during research.

It contains the entire Vulgate (Old and New Testaments), two versions of Psalms, and the Apocrypha (several books that did not get included in the official Bible due to their doubtful origin and relevance). Perhaps because the book was so large and the materials so expensive, space was saved by sorting each box of the Bible immediately following the ending of the previous book, not getting its own starting page as chapters usually do. Space was also saved by the use of many abbreviations and shorter spellings of words.

Many projects of this size and complexity would employ multiple scribes for different sections, and it is possible to detect the different "hand" of different scribes. The style of penmanship of the Winchester , however, is so consistent that the conclusion is that it was the work of a single scribe. If that is the case, it would have taken about four years to write the text.

Although all the text is complete, the illustrations are not. Many illustrations are mere sketches missing their color, or incompletely colored. The illustrations show the work of several different artists. A 20th-century medievalist examined the manuscript and found consistencies among certain illustrations that he claims allowed him to identify the artists. He referred to them as the Master of the Leaping Figures, the Master of the Apocrypha Drawings, the Master of the Genesis Initial, the Master of the Amalekite, the Master of the Morgan Leaf, and the Master of the Gothic Majesty. Some of these employed styles that show Byzantine influence.

Other "foreign influence" comes from the use of the very expensive ultramarine color that could only come from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The management spared no expense.

I mentioned the source as the priory of St. Swithun at Winchester. Let's jump back in time a little to learn about Swithun.