Gospel Book (British Library, MS Royal 1. B. VII)
Encyclopedia
British Library, Royal 1. B. VII is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon
illuminated
Gospel Book
. It is closely related to the Lindisfarne Gospels
, being either copied from it or from a common model. It is not as lavishly illuminated, and the decoration shows Merovingian influence. The manuscript
contains the four Gospels in the Latin Vulgate
translation, along with prefatory and explanatory matter. It was presented to Christ Church, Canterbury in the 920s by King Athelstan, who had recorded in a note in Old English (f.15v) that upon his accession to the throne in 925 he had freed one Eadelm and his family from slavery, the earliest recorded manumission
in (post-Roman) England.
The codex
has 155 vellum
folios
and measures 11.25 by 8.5 inches. The folios are gathered into quires of eight leaves each, with a few exceptions. The ninth gathering has only seven leaves, but does not have a loss of text that would indicate a missing leaf. The fourteenth quire had ten leaves and the final quire has only four. The sixteenth gathering has lost one folio
. All but the second, sixth, and seventh gatherings have the first word of the next gathering (a catchword) at the bottom of the final page. This was done to ensure that the gatherings were placed in the proper order.
The text includes, in addition to the Gospels, the letter of Jerome
to Pope Damasus (known by its first two words Novum opus), the prologue to Jerome's commentary on the Book of Matthew, the letter of Eusebius of Caesarea
to Carpianus (Ammonius quidam) in which Eusebius explains the use of his Canon Tables, prologues to each of the Gospels, tables of capitula for each of the Gospels, tables for each of the Gospels indicating the festivals at which portions of that Gospel should be read, and the Eusebian Canon tables.
The manuscript was written in England, perhaps in a Northumbria
n monastery connected to Lindisfarne
or Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, though "the Frankish influence in the decoration and display script ... might equally suggest origins in Mercia
". The text is written in insular
half-uncial
in two columns. There are two or more hands found in the manuscript. Each chapter begins with a line of text written in red ink. There are markings for the Ammonian sections in the margins.
The manuscript was copied either from the Lindisfarne Gospels
, or from a common source. The text was originally almost identical to that of the Lindisfarne, however in this manuscript many readings, that are otherwise peculiar to Lindisfarne, have been erased and corrected. A significant variation from the Lindisfarne text is that after , this manuscript contains an addition which reads, in part, Vos autem queritis . . . erit tibi utilius. This addition is not found in the Lindisfarne Gospels, however it is found in an early 10th century manuscript, also in the British Library (Royal, 1 A. XVIII). The tables of the capitula for the Gospels of Luke and John are identical to those in the Lindisfarne Gospels, as are the tables for the festival readings. These tables include festivals which were celebrated only in Naples
(The Nativity of St. Januarius and the Dedication of the Basilica of Stephen). The source of the text for this manuscript and the Lindisfarne Gospels was probably a hypothetical "Neapolitan Gospelbook" brought to England by Adrian of Canterbury
, a companion of Theodore of Tarsus
who according to Bede
had been abbot
of Nisida
, an (also hypothetical) monastery near Naples. Other books with the same textual character are the Stonyhurst Gospel
and the St Petersburg Gospels.
The illumination in the manuscript is limited to the Canon tables and four large initial
s. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as (the first verse after the Genealogy of Jesus
), are begun with enlarged initials decorated in black, red, yellow and green in an early Anglo-Saxon style. These initials are surrounded by small red dots, which is a common motif in many Insular manuscripts, including the Lindisfarne Gospels. The prologues and the Gospel of John begin with enlarged black initials which are also surrounded by red dots. The Canon Tables are under column
s and arch
es of black lines decorated in colored designs.
These texts appear in the following order. Note the eccentric order of the prefaces to the Gospel of Luke.
Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon may refer to:* Anglo-Saxons, a group that invaded Britain** Old English, their language** Anglo-Saxon England, their history, one of various ships* White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an ethnicity* Anglo-Saxon economy, modern macroeconomic term...
illuminated
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
Gospel Book
Gospel Book
The Gospel Book, Evangelion, or Book of the Gospels is a codex or bound volume containing one or more of the four Gospels of the Christian New Testament...
. It is closely related to the Lindisfarne Gospels
Lindisfarne Gospels
The Lindisfarne Gospels is an illuminated Latin manuscript of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the British Library...
, being either copied from it or from a common model. It is not as lavishly illuminated, and the decoration shows Merovingian influence. The manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
contains the four Gospels in the Latin Vulgate
Vulgate
The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...
translation, along with prefatory and explanatory matter. It was presented to Christ Church, Canterbury in the 920s by King Athelstan, who had recorded in a note in Old English (f.15v) that upon his accession to the throne in 925 he had freed one Eadelm and his family from slavery, the earliest recorded manumission
Manumission
Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. In the United States before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished most slavery, this often happened upon the death of the owner, under conditions in his will.-Motivations:The...
in (post-Roman) England.
The codex
Codex
A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...
has 155 vellum
Vellum
Vellum is mammal skin prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices or books. It is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations depending on preparation, the quality of the skin and the type of animal used...
folios
Bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...
and measures 11.25 by 8.5 inches. The folios are gathered into quires of eight leaves each, with a few exceptions. The ninth gathering has only seven leaves, but does not have a loss of text that would indicate a missing leaf. The fourteenth quire had ten leaves and the final quire has only four. The sixteenth gathering has lost one folio
Folio
Folio may refer to:* Folio , a book size* A particular edition of a book printed on folio pages, such as the First Folio of William Shakespeare's plays* A leaf of a book: see Recto and verso* Folio , a sans-serif typeface...
. All but the second, sixth, and seventh gatherings have the first word of the next gathering (a catchword) at the bottom of the final page. This was done to ensure that the gatherings were placed in the proper order.
The text includes, in addition to the Gospels, the letter of Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
to Pope Damasus (known by its first two words Novum opus), the prologue to Jerome's commentary on the Book of Matthew, the letter of Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea also called Eusebius Pamphili, was a Roman historian, exegete and Christian polemicist. He became the Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine about the year 314. Together with Pamphilus, he was a scholar of the Biblical canon...
to Carpianus (Ammonius quidam) in which Eusebius explains the use of his Canon Tables, prologues to each of the Gospels, tables of capitula for each of the Gospels, tables for each of the Gospels indicating the festivals at which portions of that Gospel should be read, and the Eusebian Canon tables.
The manuscript was written in England, perhaps in a Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
n monastery connected to Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne is a tidal island off the north-east coast of England. It is also known as Holy Island and constitutes a civil parish in Northumberland...
or Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, though "the Frankish influence in the decoration and display script ... might equally suggest origins in Mercia
Mercia
Mercia was one of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in the region now known as the English Midlands...
". The text is written in insular
Insular script
Insular script was a medieval script system originally used in Ireland, then Great Britain, that spread to continental Europe under the influence of Celtic Christianity. Irish missionaries also took the script to continental Europe, where they founded monasteries such as Bobbio. The scripts were...
half-uncial
Uncial
Uncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic.-Development:...
in two columns. There are two or more hands found in the manuscript. Each chapter begins with a line of text written in red ink. There are markings for the Ammonian sections in the margins.
The manuscript was copied either from the Lindisfarne Gospels
Lindisfarne Gospels
The Lindisfarne Gospels is an illuminated Latin manuscript of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the British Library...
, or from a common source. The text was originally almost identical to that of the Lindisfarne, however in this manuscript many readings, that are otherwise peculiar to Lindisfarne, have been erased and corrected. A significant variation from the Lindisfarne text is that after , this manuscript contains an addition which reads, in part, Vos autem queritis . . . erit tibi utilius. This addition is not found in the Lindisfarne Gospels, however it is found in an early 10th century manuscript, also in the British Library (Royal, 1 A. XVIII). The tables of the capitula for the Gospels of Luke and John are identical to those in the Lindisfarne Gospels, as are the tables for the festival readings. These tables include festivals which were celebrated only in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
(The Nativity of St. Januarius and the Dedication of the Basilica of Stephen). The source of the text for this manuscript and the Lindisfarne Gospels was probably a hypothetical "Neapolitan Gospelbook" brought to England by Adrian of Canterbury
Adrian of Canterbury
Saint Adrian of Canterbury was a famous scholar and the Abbot of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury in the English county of Kent.-Life:...
, a companion of Theodore of Tarsus
Theodore of Tarsus
Theodore was the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury, best known for his reform of the English Church and establishment of a school in Canterbury....
who according to Bede
Bede
Bede , also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede , was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow , both in the Kingdom of Northumbria...
had been abbot
Abbot
The word abbot, meaning father, is a title given to the head of a monastery in various traditions, including Christianity. The office may also be given as an honorary title to a clergyman who is not actually the head of a monastery...
of Nisida
Nisida
Nisida is a volcanic islet of the Flegrean Islands archipelago, in southern Italy. It lies at a very short distance from Cape Posillipo, just north of Naples; it is now connected to the mainland by a stone bridge. The islet is almost circular, with a flooded crater forming the bay of Porto Paone on...
, an (also hypothetical) monastery near Naples. Other books with the same textual character are the Stonyhurst Gospel
Stonyhurst Gospel
The Stonyhurst Gospel, also known as the St Cuthbert Gospel or the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, is a small 7th-century pocket gospel book, written in Latin, which was probably placed in the tomb of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a few years after he died in 687...
and the St Petersburg Gospels.
The illumination in the manuscript is limited to the Canon tables and four large initial
Initial
In a written or published work, an initial is a letter at the beginning of a work, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is derived from the Latin initialis, which means standing at the beginning...
s. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as (the first verse after the Genealogy of Jesus
Genealogy of Jesus
The genealogy of Jesus is described in two passages of the Gospels: Luke 3:23–38 and Matthew 1:1–17.* Matthew's genealogy commences with Abraham and then from King David's son Solomon follows the legal line of the kings through Jeconiah, the king whose descendants were cursed, to Joseph, legal...
), are begun with enlarged initials decorated in black, red, yellow and green in an early Anglo-Saxon style. These initials are surrounded by small red dots, which is a common motif in many Insular manuscripts, including the Lindisfarne Gospels. The prologues and the Gospel of John begin with enlarged black initials which are also surrounded by red dots. The Canon Tables are under column
Column
A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. For the purpose of wind or earthquake engineering, columns may be designed to resist lateral forces...
s and arch
Arch
An arch is a structure that spans a space and supports a load. Arches appeared as early as the 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamian brick architecture and their systematic use started with the Ancient Romans who were the first to apply the technique to a wide range of structures.-Technical aspects:The...
es of black lines decorated in colored designs.
These texts appear in the following order. Note the eccentric order of the prefaces to the Gospel of Luke.
- Folio 1r - The letter of Jerome (Novum opus)
- Folio 2v - Prologue to Jerome's commentary on Matthew (Plures fuisse)
- Folio 3v - Letter of Eusebius (Ammonius quidam)
- Folio 4v - Prologue to Matthew (Mattheus in Iudea)
- Folio 5r - Table of capitula for Matthew
- Folio 8r - Table of festivals readings for Matthew (Pridu (sic) natale Domini)
- Folio 9r - Eusebian Canon Tables
- Folio 15r - Gospel of Matthew
- Folio 52r - Prologue to Mark (Marchus euangelista Dei)
- Folio 52v - Table of capitula for Mark
- Folio 54v - Table of festivals readings for Mark (Sabbato sancto mane)
- Folio 55r - Gospel of MarkGospel of MarkThe Gospel According to Mark , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Mark or simply Mark, is the second book of the New Testament. This canonical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the three synoptic gospels. It was thought to be an epitome, which accounts for its place as the second...
- Folio 78r - Table of festivals readings for Luke, titled Secundum Lucam (In ieiunium sancti Iohannis)
- Folio 78v - Prologue to Luke (Lucas Syrus Antiochensis)
- Folio 79r - Table of capitula for Luke
- Folio 84r - Gospel of LukeGospel of LukeThe Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...
- Folio 128r - Prologue to John (Iohannes euangelista unus)
- Folio 129r - Table of capitula for John
- Folio 130r - Table of festivals readings for John titled Secundum Iohannem (In sancti Iohannis apostoli)
- Folio 130v - Gospel of JohnGospel of JohnThe Gospel According to John , commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John, and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus...