The Book of Kells

The BBC once suggested it was "Medieval Europe's greatest treasure." The Book of Kells is a Latin Gospel (with added material) created c.800 CE whose precise place of origin is unknown. For centuries it resided at the Abbey of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, which is how it got its current name.

It has 340 vellum leaves, 13 by 9.8 inches, both sides of which are used, totaling 680 pages which were bound into four separate volumes in 1953. Ten of the pages are illustrations, like the "Chi ro" page seen here. Chi ro are the first letters of Christ's name. It stands out because of the ornate illustrations, combining traditional Christian iconography with the complex and intertwined images of animals and humans found in the art of the British Isles. Even the text pages are filled with elaborate decoration. The text, written with iron gall ink, gives evidence of handwriting by at least three different scribes.

For a long time the book was thought to be created in the time of St. Columba, possibly even by him, but the style of the lettering system suggests it was long after. Proponents of the Columba theory suggest that maybe it was created to mark the 200th anniversary of his death. Various theories place its origin at Iona, or Kells, or started at the former and finished at the latter.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of its history is that it survived Viking invasions and other events. The Annals of Ulster record (the first reference to the book) that in 1007 "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" (a wrought shrine is the elaborately and richly decorated box for holding a book). The Annals' reference to Columcille (St. Columba's real name) is why scholars link it to him.

The Book of Kells now resides in the Trinity College Library in Dublin. If you'd like your own copy, you can find a facsimile edition here.

For a more lighthearted look at medieval books, how about if tomorrow we look at the first medieval book of jokes?

The Lindisfarne Gospels

Among the many ancient books we have now thanks to Robert Cotton's hobby of collecting and cataloging medieval manuscripts, the British Library contains Cotton Nero D.iv, better known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. The 516 vellum pages would have required about 150 calf skins. The ink is dark brown and contains soot. They illustrations use scores of different shades of color—some imported from the Mediterranean—made from animal and vegetable and mineral sources and bound with egg white. A few small spots are gold.

Best estimate is that the book was produced c.715-720 CE at the monastery at Lindisfarne by a monk (later bishop) named Eadfrith, who never quite finished the work. Written in Latin, the book is lavishly illustrated (the illustration is of a facsimile edition available here).

In the late 900s, in a monastery at Chester-le-Street—where the monks of Lindisfarne settled after fleeing the Vikings—a priest named Aldred decided the book needed an Old English translation, which he added between the lines of Latin. He also added a colophon to the book that tells us more about the production of it:

Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne church, originally wrote this book for God and for St Cuthbert and—jointly—for all saints whose relics are in the island. And Æthelwald, bishop of the Lindisfarne islanders, impressed it on the outside and covered it ... And Billfrið the anchorite forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and gems and with gilded-on silver-pure metal ...

The Gospels disappeared from view after the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, turning up later in the Cotton Library. The binding described above is no more, presumably lost during the time of Viking raids. A new binding wasn't added until 1852, arranged by the bishop of Durham.

The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most impressive books of its era—or perhaps of any other, except, of course, for the Gospel we're going to look at tomorrow. See you then.

Medieval Paints and Pigments

Where did medieval manuscript illuminators get their colors?

Well, first thing to realize is that they weren't re-inventing the wheel: Romans had colored paints available to them. The Romans used the term minium to refer to pigment from ground cinnabar (brick-red mercury sulfide) or red lead (lead oxide). Some minerals that were dug up and ground included:

red ochre — iron oxide/hematite (rust color)
yellow ochre — silica and clay/iron oxyhydroxides (shades from cream to brown)
umber — iron and manganese oxides (from cream to brown)
lime white — dried lime/chalk (white)
green earth (Verona green) — celadonite/glauconite (green)
azurite — carbonate of copper (blue)
ultramarine — lapis lazuli (blue)

Pigments could also be made from plants. Red could be made from the root of the Eurasian madder plant. The Crozophora plant's seeds produced a violet-blue. Saffron gave yellow. Woad and indigo came from plants that carried the same name. Let's not forget insects, that could be crushed to give the bright-red carmine (from the cochineal or Dactylopius coccus scale insect). 

Preparation of paints was a careful process. The coloring was usually mixed gum arabic or with egg. Egg tempera (from the yolk) or egg glair (from the white) were ways to "fix" the pigment to the surface you were using. Because the egg tempera could crack, it was applied in paintings in thin layers.

Some colors were more special than others. Ultramarine (literally "beyond the sea"), the blue made from grinding lapis lazuli, came from Afghanistan and was very expensive to obtain. This brightest blue, however, was associated with the gown of Mary, the mother of Jesus, so it was greatly desired and worth the price.

Another questio0n regarding color in the Middle Ages comes to mind, however. How did they get the color into glass? That's for next time.

Masters of Marginalia

Marginalia—comments, doodles, annotations, etc., made in the margin of a manuscript or book—came in many forms. Here we talked about the attempts at educating and clarifying by scholiasts.

Today we look at the less serious additions made by monks who were no doubt bored and decided to exercise their sense of humor.

There are so many web pages where you can find more in varying stages of frivolity and obscenity if you simply search "medieval marginalia" the you can send days of diversion that it would be pointless for me to try to give you more than just a bare minimum of representative figures.

These marginalia don't make much sense, in that they don't generally have anything to do with the text they accompany except in the most tenuous way. For instance, the bottom illustration in the collection I have included shows a fox as a bishop preaching to a flock of different birds, which would normally be his prey. Commentary by a monk on what he really thinks about bishops and their attitude toward their congregations? Or just an attempt at an ironic drawing of animals?

Snails actually show up frequently, often involving combat. The top right shows a snail with an animal's head. Below that is a snail fighting a knight. There is conjecture that the shell of the snail, since it resembled a kind of armor, was an appropriate foe for a knight.

Some additions are attractive additions, like the unicorn, although right above it is a curious animal-headed set of tentacles or vines. I would call that simply a doodle.

Then you have pictures that are far more irreverent than a fox preaching to birds, such as the monk sniffing the butt of an ... animal? Demon? Hard to say what it is in that top-left illustration. At least it is very attractively enclosed in the curves and points of its surrounding frame.

We should note that the making of marginalia was not that impulsive; that is, the manuscript copyist did not say to himself "I'll just out a goose playing a lute here." These were added by someone who was sitting with access to multiple colors of ink in front of him. He was the monk tasked with "prettying up" the manuscript in order to make it more valuable and less likely to bore the reader. Hundreds of years later, these colors remain on the vellum, which has got me thinking: where did colored inks/paints come from in the Middle Ages?

I will look into that question, and get back to you. See you tomorrow.

Making Ink

When the oak gall wasp lands on a species of oak, it secretes a chemical that interferes with the tree's normal growth, producing a bulb, or gall, into which its eggs are inserted; they will grow to be wasps that crawl out of the gall.

Somewhere along the way, folk learned that the galls could be used for something other than a wasp hatchery. Pliny makes a vague reference to oak gall ink. The typical way to make ink from oak galls was to crush the galls, add water, and boil the concoction; sprinkling in some iron sulfate turns the mixture black.

Too much iron could be problematic, however. It turned the ink corrosive, and too much iron could destroy (over time) the document for which it was used. But oak gall ink was the popular ink for 1400 years, and some of the oldest manuscripts have easily survived. The Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest Bible known (from c.325 CE), used oak gall ink.

Oak gall ink, sometimes called iron gall ink, was prevalent for at least 1400 years. The majority of manuscripts from the Middle Ages were made with oak gall ink, which dries to a light brown. Great Britain and France mandated oak gall ink for legal records. The popularity extended to the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci used oak gall ink. Even later, the U.S. Postal Service had its own prescribed version of oak gall ink at their branches.

One of the reasons the popularity of iron gall ink faded was the rise of the fountain pen. The ink was suitable for dip pens, but dip pens hold only a little ink on the tip, and the writer had to constantly re-dip the pen point into the ink and be careful not to splatter ink drops while traveling from the ink bottle to the page. Fountain pens were developed that stored more ink and released it slowly, as the ink was drawn from the tip. The fountain pen uses capillary action to raw the ink along a thin barrel, and the iron in iron gall ink could create deposits in the barrel that would impede the smooth flow of the ink. The development of other ink formulations made fountain pens more useful.

Oak gall ink is still manufactured for those few who want it. The U.S. Postal Service no longer uses it. But that suggests a direction for tomorrow: how did mail service work in the Middle Ages?

A Brief History of Ink

You see it everywhere, yet we never give it a moment's thought. Almost everything printed uses ink. (There are heat-sensitive labels/receipts, and photocopiers don't use liquid anymore.) Carving in stone or wood, pressing into clay—these were sufficient ways to make records, but the result was a cumbersome piece of material to lug around or deliver. Once we started using thin, flat sheets of light material, we needed something to create images on it that would be durable and neat, not become illegible over time.

Just about every culture in the early stages of writing developed lampblack, carbon mixed with a liquid that would allow it to be spread neatly. Egypt added iron and ocher for red ink. China was grinding graphite mixed with water and applied with brushes. China also used soot and animal glue as of the 3rd century BCE.

India ink has been around for thousands of years, having been invented in China. A mixture of fine soot and water, it was used at least a thousand years BCE. It became known as "India ink" (in British English, "Indian ink") because the materials were sourced from India. It is still used for comic books and other purposes.

Countless materials were experimented with to create cheap and Latin inks. Ferrous sulfate and oak galls produced an ink that dried to a dull brown and is familiar on numerous medieval manuscripts.

During the time of Gutenberg, most inks were of two kinds: a mixture of soot, water, and glue as a binder, used since the Classical Era; and the medieval combination of ferrous sulfate, gall, water, and gum as a binder. (The binder was to make it water-resistant and therefore more durable.) Unfortunately, while fine for writing, they were unsuitable to the printing press because of their tendency to "blur" when applied with pressure. Even worse, iron gall ink can be corrosive to paper; the presence of iron causes oxidation of the cellulose in the paper. Johann Sebastian Bach's original works are being eaten away by the ink he used. 

Gutenberg's innovation was oil-based, mixed with lampblack (soot), varnish and egg white. This combination made a sharper impression when pressed onto paper or vellum, producing a clear image that did not blur or fade over time.

Oak gall ink, however, was popular in the Middle Ages and even used by Pliny. It might be worth taking a closer look at. Stay tuned.