Alcuin

Alcuin was born around 735 and grew up in York, where he attended the cathedral school. Encouraged by his teachers, one of whom became the Archbishop of York, he was appointed head of the school, where he was one of the key figures in preserving and enlarging the cathedral library. He gained such a reputation as a teacher that in 782 Charlemagne invited him to come to the continent to establish a palace school and scriptorium. Alcuin stayed with Charlemagne till his retirement in 796, when Charlemagne appointed him abbot of a monastery at Tours.He died in 804.



Alcuin's palace school at Charlemagne's court seems to have been an important influence in the adoption of the script we know as Caroline Minuscule (example above) and the copying of manuscripts in the new script. The picture below of Alcuin presenting manuscripts to Charlemagne was painted by Victor Schnetz in 1830 and is now in Paris's Louvre.



Alcuin wrote a number of textbooks in the form of dialogues. One example is this dialogue between Alcuin and Charlemagne's son Pippin. He also produced a set of mathematical puzzles Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes. The Wikipedia article on this work (caveat quaerens) links to a Latin version and a couple of English translations.

Alcuin also edited the Vulgate and wrote a number of theological works on the Trinity. The Catholic Encyclopedia and the Anglican Biographical Sketches have articles on Alcuin from their respective viewpoints. (all images are in the public domain and are taken from wikicommons)

Happy Bede's Day

25 May is the day the Anglican Church commemorates the Venerable Bede, patron saint of English historians. Here is the collect for the day:

God our maker,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to your servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word that leads us to know you and to love you:
in your goodness
grant that we also may come at length to you,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before your face;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Celebrating Bede's Day last year, Michelle of Heavenfield, posted an alternative collect and some of Bede's prayers in her blog, Selah.

Earlier this year, Pope Benedict XVI dedicated one of his audiences to Bede. The Vatican has posted an official text of what he said.

The Orthodox Church celebrates Bede on 27 May. Donna Farley, who is a member of that communion, is also promoting Bede on his day this year on Haliwerfolc, one of her many blogs.

Youtube has a brief clip discussing Bede from Channel 4's Christianity: A History. You'll have to watch it on Youtube's site because embedding is disabled.(public domain picture from the Nuremberg Chronicle via wikicommons).

The Vespasian Psalter

The Vespasian Psalter dates back to the first quarter of the 8th century and is now in the British Library. It is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, surviving manuscript with historiated initials. It also contains an Anglo-Saxon gloss on the Latin text and again is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, surviving examples of translation of part of the Bible into English. The Medieval Writing site has more information about Psalters (click the links in the text to go to the very useful glossary of terms), while Fathom's Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts sets t the Vespasian Psalter in a wider context.

The manuscript came to the British Library from Sir Robert Cotton's library. Each bookcase contained the bust of a Roman emperor and this particular Psalter was in the case which had the bust of Vespasian, hence its name.



The above picture shows King David as the author of the Psalms (public domain image from wikicommons). The British Library's Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts (scroll down) shows the same page in its context opposite a historiated initial for Psalm 26 (27 in the usual numbering for English Bibles) showing David and Jonathan.

The Vulgate text of the Psalm:

1. David Dominus lux mea et salutare meum quem timebo Dominus fortitudo vitae meae quem formidabo
2. cum adpropinquarent mihi maligni ut comederent carnem meam hostes mei et inimici mei ipsi inpigerunt et ceciderunt
3. si steterint adversus me castra non timebit cor meum si surrexerit contra me bellum in hoc ego confidam
4. unum petivi a Domino hoc requiram ut habitem in domo Domini omnibus diebus vitae meae ut videam pulchritudinem Domini et adtendam templum eius
5. abscondet enim me in umbra sua in die pessima abscondet me in secreto tabernaculi sui
6. in petra exaltabit me nunc quoque exaltabit caput meum super inimicos meos qui sunt in circuitu meo et immolabo in tabernaculo eius hostias iubili cantabo et psallam Domino
7. audi Domine vocem meam invocantis miserere mei et exaudi me
8. tibi dixit cor meum quaesivit vultus meus faciem tuam Domine et requiram
9. ne abscondas faciem tuam a me ne declines in furore tuo a servo tuo auxilium meum fuisti ne derelinquas me et ne dimittas me Deus salvator meus
10. pater enim meus et mater mea dereliquerunt me Dominus autem collegit me
11. ostende mihi Domine viam tuam et deduc me in semita recta propter insidiatores meos
12. ne tradas me Domine animae tribulantium me quoniam surrexerunt contra me testes falsi et apertum mendacium
13. ego autem credo quod videam bona Domini in terra viventium
14. expecta Dominum confortare et roboretur cor tuum et sustine Dominum

Lindisfarne

The island of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island as it is also known, is a tidal island on the East coast of England near the Scottish-English border.


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A Youtube slideshow of photos from Lindisfarne, with Era's Avemano as soundtrack:



At the invitation of King Oswald of Northumbria, St. Aidan came from Iona to build a monastery at Lindisfarne to serve as a basis for the evangelisation of Oswald's pagan subjects. Bede's account of Aidan's work in Lindisfarne and Northumbria can be seen in Book III of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Chapter III describes Lindisfarne and tells how Aidan came there, Chapters V and VI tell us about Aidan's way of life and his relationship with King Oswald. Chapters XIV - XVII give some more anecdotes about Aidan and tell us about his death on 31 August 651.

You can read the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on St. Aidan, an Anglican account, and how he is remembered on Lindisfarne itself.



Another saint closely linked to Lindisfarne is St. Cuthbert. As a young man at the time of Aidan's death, Cuthbert is said to have seen a vision of Aidan's soul being taken up to heaven by angels and decided to enter a monastery, first at Melrose Abbey, and then at Lindisfarne. Cuthbert died in 687. Eleven years after his death his grave was opened and his body was found to be still undecayed. This led Bede to write a Life of Cuthbert.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has an article on Cuthbert, an Anglican view can be read here, and the view from Lindisfarne here. A triptych by Ernest Duez showing episodes from Cuthbert's life is now in the Musee d'Orsay. Haliwerfolc is a blog devoted to St. Cuthbert.


Bede's "Life of Cuthbert" is dedicated to Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, who was the scribe and illustrator for Lindisfarne's most famous product, the Lindisfarne Gospels -- or so a note at the end of the gospels says, though not everyone believes it. The Lindisfarne gospels are now in the British Library, which has information on them online with links to more detailed information and highlights from the book. For more information see this course on the Lindisfarne Gospels. Much later, in 970, Aldred wrote an interlinear translation of the Gospels into Old English. This article discusses Aldred's translation.

The Lindisfarne Gospels' current location in the British Library in London has been a source of some controversy, and a deal has now been worked out whereby the Gospels will now spend some time in their homeland of Northumbria. Here are reports on this issue from the BBC and The Independent.

It was in 793 that the Lindisfarne suffered the first in a series of Viking raids. Eventually, the monks decided their situation on Lindisfarne was untenable and they moved to the mainland, taking the body of St. Cuthbert with them. Eventually his body ended up in Durham cathedral, where it it still is today. (all illustrations in the public domain from wiki commons, unless otherwise noted)

The Codex Amiatinus

In the life of Ceolfrith in his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, Bede says of Ceolfrith:

For, among other arrangements which he found it necessary to make, during his long government of the monastery, he built several oratories increased the number of vessels of the church and altar and the vestments of every kind; and the library of both monasteries, which Abbot Benedict had so actively begun under his equally zealous care became doubled in extent For he added three Pandects of a new translation to that of the old translation which he had brought from Rome; one of them, returning to Rome in his old age, he took with him as a gift; the other two he left to the two monasteries.

One of these bibles Ceolfrith took to Rome still survives as the Codex Amiatinus, which ended up in a monastery (it is not known quite how) on Mount Amiata (hence the name). It stayed there for the best part of a thousand years until the monastery was closed in 1780, when the Codex Amiatinus was taken to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, where it remains today. This article gives more details about the history of the Codex, including the story of how it was discovered to be one of Ceolfrith's Bibles.

A replica of the Codex was given in to the city of Sunderland in 2004 to commemorate the city's adoption of Benedict Biscop, the founder of the monaster of Wearmouth and Jarrow, as its patron saint. A 2001 congress in Florence called "The City and the Book" included two papers on the Codex Amiatinus, one, with illustrations, from the Director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, and the other from Lucia Castaldi, arguing, amongst others, for Bede's involvement in the production of the Codex, a view which Michelle of Heavenfield firmly rejects in this blog entry.



This page shows the handwriting in the Codex Amiatinus and another handwritten page is discussed here.

To put the Codex into a wider context, this page comes from a series on insular manuscripts, including the Book of Durrow, which I blogged on earlier. (public domain images from wiki commons)

The Book of Durrow

The Book of Durrow is an illuminated manuscript of the Latin translation of the four gospels of the New Testament, most likely written in the 7th century AD at the monastery at Durrow in Ireland founded by St. Columba. It is now in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Although most people probably think of the artistic style as "Celtic", it is more properly known as "insular" or "Hiberno-Saxon" since the art of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples of the British Isles at this time shared many features and if the origin of a manuscript is unknown, it is difficult to say just from its appearance whether it is a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon production.

Here we have one illustrated description of the Book of Durrow, placing it in a Celtic context, while here another article discusses it as part of a series of pages on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. This entry from a blog on Early Medieval Art discusses the Book of Durrow but would be more useful with illustrations.

Since we are now in Advent, this page from the Book of Durrow has the beginning of Matthew's version of the Christmas story.


One of the Book of Durrow's famous carpet pages:


Each gospel is accompanied by a symbol of the evangelist. Unusually, the Book of Durrow symbolises John with a lion:


The small picture at the top is the beginning of Mark's gospel. For a double page spread with a much larger version and its accompanying carpet page, go here. (all pictures in this post are from wikicommons and are in the public domain)

Sutton Hoo

The Oxford DNB has put up the Sutton Hoo ship burial as one of its biographies for the week (available till Thursday). An archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo in the 1930s found a ship burial with splendid grave goods from the early 7th century. (Steven J. Plunkett's picture of model of ship burial used under GNU Free Documentation Licence.)



Location of Sutton Hoo (the site itself is quite visible if you zoom in):

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The Sutton Hoo Society's website has a (not very) interactive map of the site, a good picture gallery and some archaeological information. The goods found were donated to the British Museum by the owner of the land at the time of the excavation, Mrs Edith May Pretty. The National Trust now owns the site and has information for visitors.

The most likely candidate for who was buried at Sutton Hoo is Rædwald, who was king of East Anglia and bretwald (high king of England) and died some time between 616 and 627. Bede has some passing references to Rædwald ( II.12 and 11.15), but nothing that would have led one to suspect the magnificence of this discovery. However, since Rædwald was a king who accepted Christianity and then changed his mind, and a king of East Anglia at that (Bede's focus is on Augustine's first mission to Kent and then on Northumbria), Bede would not have much to say about him. Rædwald was one of the Wuffing dynasty, and Dr. Sam Newton's site on the Wuffings naturally discusses Sutton Hoo in some detail.