First the book, next the video, then the CD‐ROM, and now back to the book, and all that out of another book made more than a thousand years ago. By any standards the Lindisfarne Gospels is not just one of the treasures of the British Library, but one of the greatest treasures of British heritage; to those of us who know the semi‐island of Lindisfarne, that sense of treasure is hugely enlarged by the association with the place: it is impractical for a host of reasons to expect the original to be stored or displayed back where it was made, but there is an interesting result where book and location interact: in London when looking at the manuscript, images of the remote island come immediately to mind; on Lindisfarne one carries memories of seeing the book. Still, there is (or was the last time I was there) a facsimile on display in St Mary's Church, and currently a new facsimile is being prepared with a copy promised to the island.
All the attention is well deserved by any standard. One of those standards is intrinsic, the artistic merit of the illuminations and the manuscript as a physical work of art; another is external: the book's place within the eighth century Christian church in Britain and beyond. These themes are all examined in suitable detail by Dr Michelle P. Brown, the British Library's Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts. Her book accompanies a major exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Library and sets the book in its wider historical, cultural and ecclesiastical, as well as its artistic, context.
The full story is here. How and why the book was conceived, how it was constructed and illuminated and how it survived various vicissitudes to survive for our wonder. The text is discussed as are the illuminations, while appendices offer technical and scholarly material in support, including a detailed and comprehensive bibliography and index and a CD‐ROM with a key to manuscript sigla in the final column of the text table, showing the textual arrangement with a selective collation. It is illustrated by 32 colour plates and by black and white (and a few further colour) illustrations in the text.
Part of the scholarly British Library Studies in Medieval Culture series, this is a work primarily although not exclusively for the serious student. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to choose between this still readable and accessible work at £45 in hardback or £19.95 in paperback, or a shorter, full colour illustrated introduction, again by Michelle P. Brown (2003), at a bargain £5.95. The shorter book is highly accessible and still covers all the main themes, while this fuller version is both an important and instructive volume.
