Christian books, not Iron Age art
The manuscripts usually described as Celtic illuminated books were made roughly between the seventh and ninth centuries CE, in monasteries in Ireland, Scotland and northern England. They are Christian gospel books written in Latin. “Celtic” here points to the Irish and Irish-influenced monastic tradition that produced them, and to older ornament that the scribes inherited, not to the Iron Age peoples of the earlier Celtic world, who left no books at all. Art historians generally prefer the term Insular art for this group, a word that refers to the islands of Britain and Ireland.
The main books
The Book of Kells, now at Trinity College Dublin, is the best known. It is usually dated to around 800 CE. Where it was made is debated: a common view is that work began on the island of Iona, a monastery founded by Columba, and was completed or moved to Kells in Ireland after Viking raids on Iona in the early ninth century. It contains the four gospels in Latin, with hundreds of pages of decoration. About 340 leaves survive.
The Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Library, were made on Holy Island off the Northumbrian coast, probably in the early eighth century. A later note added in the tenth century names Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, as the scribe, and a priest named Aldred added a word-for-word Old English translation between the lines. That gloss is often described as the oldest surviving English version of the gospels.
The Book of Durrow, from the late seventh century, is earlier and plainer. It is kept in Dublin, and its pages already show the main ingredients: interlace, animals and spirals.
All three show that the tradition was not confined to one region. Irish monks founded Iona, and from there Lindisfarne was settled, so the art of Ireland and Northumbria developed together.
How a gospel book was made
Pages were made from animal skin, typically calfskin, scraped, stretched and cut. Scribes ruled lines by pricking the edge and drawing guides with a stylus. They wrote with quills and iron-gall or carbon inks in a rounded script called Insular half-uncial.
Painters worked with mineral and plant pigments. Orpiment, a yellow mineral, was probably imported from the eastern Mediterranean, and other colours came from lead, copper compounds and plants. Gold is rare in the Irish books. The Book of Kells relies on colour, not metal leaf, for its glow.
Dating these books is largely a matter of script, style and historical clues. Radiocarbon dating can test the age of parchment, but its margin of error is usually wider than the span argued over by art historians, so it supports rather than settles most dating debates.
What is on the pages
Pages tend to fall into a few types:
- Evangelist portraits, stylised figures that look flat and rather ornamental
- Carpet pages, full pages of pure pattern that resemble woven rugs and may have served as devotional focus
- Decorated initials, which can swell to fill a whole page, as with the Chi-Rho page of Kells that opens the account of Christ’s birth
- Marginal figures, including animals, birds and small human forms
The ornament mixes sources. The trumpet-shaped spirals trace back to the Iron Age La Tène style, kept alive in metalwork. Interlaced animals and ribbons share features with Anglo-Saxon and Germanic art, as on rich burial goods from England. The plaited borders probably owe something to the wider late Roman and Mediterranean world. Pictish symbol stones in Scotland, carved in the same centuries, share some of the same animals and curves, which shows how widely these motifs moved.
Purpose and use
These large, heavy books were probably made less for casual reading than for ceremony and display. They were likely kept on altars and carried in procession, and they honoured the text itself. The Book of Kells in particular contains errors and layouts that would make it awkward for daily use, which is one reason many scholars see it as a showpiece.
Survival and loss
Monasteries were repeatedly raided, burned and reformed, and many Insular books were lost. Their survival is partly luck. For comparison, the Dead Sea Scrolls lasted twenty centuries because they were hidden in dry caves, while Irish and British gospel books lasted because communities valued them enough to protect and move them. The Kells manuscript was kept in Ireland through the Middle Ages and was given to Trinity College in the seventeenth century.
The books also mark a turning point in western Europe. After the fall of Rome, Latin learning and book production were kept alive on the Atlantic fringe by monks who had to learn Latin as a foreign language. Their habit of separating words with spaces helped make reading easier, and it spread to the continent. By the time of the Charlemagne coronation in 800, Irish and Northumbrian scribes were already influencing continental centres of learning, because many Insular monks worked in mainland Europe.
Why the label still matters
Calling these works Celtic is convenient but easy to misread. They show a Christian monastic culture that combined local pre-Christian ornament with international influences, and they cannot be used as a window onto Iron Age beliefs. They do, however, show how an old decorative vocabulary of spirals and curves lived on and was reworked in a new religion, and how the Greek and Latin alphabets became the means by which that vocabulary was put on the page.