How the Book of Kells Works

Created around 800 AD, the Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript held at Trinity College in Ireland. Listen in to learn more about the Book of Kells -- and how it survived for so long -- in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy, and today we're
going to talk about what might be the most beautiful
book in the world, the Book of Cows. Yeah, when

(00:22):
my mom was in her teens traveling in Dublin, she
made sure to visit the Book of Kells as often
as she could because back then they used to change
the pages over every day or so and you could
see a new illumination in new text. And now they
only turn the pages of the manuscripts every few months.
But when I visited Dublin a little more than a
year ago, I made sure to check in with the

(00:44):
Book of Kells and um, it's probably the most famous
book in the world, maybe the most beautiful, and it's
kept at Trinity College, which is right in the middle
of Dublin. After taking a look at the famous campus arch,
you can take a turn in the college library and
there's a whole exhibit devoted to the book. Before getting

(01:04):
a glimpse at its pages, the museum impresses upon its
visitors the whole significance of this volume. You know what
the Book of Kells means and why it's so important,
its age, the skill and time it took to make it,
the scholarship surrounding it, and the miracle of it even surviving.
And finally you get to this packed room where two
of the four manuscripts are displayed, and four manuscripts make

(01:26):
up the whole. We don't want to give the impression
they are different copies, um, but each manuscript represents a gospel,
and one has turned to an illuminated page and one
to a page of script, and the writing is really
shapely and clear, and the illumination is colorful and detailed,
and so detailed in fact, that you never could get
quite a close enough view and long enough of you

(01:49):
and that big crowd of people to to see everything.
But it's still amazing to look at something that's so
intricate and so beautiful and more than one thousand, two
hundred years old old. So no wonder it's often considered
Ireland's National treasure and attracts five hundred thousand visitors a year.
So let's dive into the history of the book. Yeah,

(02:09):
so the Book of Kells isn't just famous for its beauty,
and its skill of craftsmanship. It's shrouded in mystery and
there are all these misadventures. It's so amazing that we
actually still have this book and it's in as good
a shape as it is. So for centuries there has
been arguments about where it originated, whether it was Ireland
or Northern England or Scotland, but the most likely story

(02:34):
starts way back in five sixty one or maybe five
sixty three. So in five sixty one or five sixty three,
the Irish Saint Columba or column Kill which means delve
of the Church, who was an Irish monk inscribe, fled
Ireland and founded a monastery on Iona, An Island off
the west coast of Scotland, and this became a missionary

(02:55):
center to people of Irish descent who were living in
the area. Yeah, so they were there for a while,
but in eight oh six a Viking raid on the
island left sixty eight months dead. So the Columbian monks
take off. They're not going to risk that happening again,
and they moved to a new monastery at Kells in
County Meath, which is northwest of Dublin. And the book

(03:18):
was probably written close to eight hundred a d. But
we can't quite guess if it was written completely at Iona,
completely at Kel's or a mixture of both, because you know,
after all, a book is pretty portable. You could bring
it when you were fleeing to your new monastery. There's
some other lesser accepted hypotheses, like one that says it

(03:38):
was written in North England, maybe Linda's Farn, the site
of perhaps the second most famous illustrated manuscript of the period,
Um brought to Iona and then Kells, or maybe right
to Kells. Or it was possibly made at an East
Scottish monaster. The controversy, but we're going to go with that.
Iona to Kell's story. I think, Um, life at Kells

(03:59):
isn't easy, are the beautiful manuscript either though? It's the
city is constantly being sacked by Danes and locals, lots
of Irish infighting. Um, So it's really impressive that it
survives this period too, let alone it's it's earlier days
we know for sure of its presence and Kells by

(04:19):
ten oh six or ten oh seven, and Kati and
I were saying, it's so strange thing ten of going
one thousands UM and that's when the Annals of Ulster
told that quote the Great Gospel of column Kill, the
chief relic of the Western world, was wickedly stolen during
the night on account of its rot shrine. Two months

(04:42):
and twenty days later it was found under assad, missing
its gold and jewel encrusted shrine and a few pages.
But things still don't look up for the Book of Kells.
Its existence is not easy in even the coming centuries,
and it's defaced and damaged. And in the twelfth century
charters concerning monastery business are copied onto its blank pages,

(05:05):
which sounds so weird. Using the Book of Kells's scrap
paper essentially horrifying. I'd don't even dog your library book.
It's a common practice at the time, though, um you
know when paper or vellum is rare. And also in
the twelfth century, the monks lost the book. Due to
ecclesiastical reform, the monastery at Kell's ceased to exist and

(05:27):
the property passed on to the Bishopric of Meath, so
the book stayed in what was now the parish church.
So it stayed in the same spot. It just was
no longer under the monk's protection right, And in sixteen
fifty four the Cromwellian cavalry quartered in the church and
this was bad news. Um. I'm sure that the people

(05:48):
responsible for the book are concerned that the English will
run off with it, so they send it to Dublin
for safety. And after sixteen sixty one it's officially presented
to try the College by Henry Jones, who goes on
to become the Bishop of me after restoration, and that's
its home now. It has not gotten back to Kell's

(06:09):
and we'll talk about that more later. The last terrifying
book crime we have to account was not at the
hands of the Vikings or the English, but in eighteen
twenty one book binder who cut off about half an
inch at the outer margins of the book, including decorations,
sorts of priceless decoration, and that's just gone. I mean

(06:29):
you could imagine I'm sweeping it away. I'm still angry.
It's pretty tragic. It's rebound in by a more responsible binder. Um.
It's getting kind of messed up after this binding though.
The pages that are displayed frequently are having pigment damage
and it's just getting soiled because it's touched so much.

(06:52):
And our final binding we're going to mention is in
nineteen fifty three when it's repaired and rebound by Roger Powell,
who was a leading conservation book binder, and he puts
it into the four volumes that we know today, which
correspond to a Gospel. And um, there we go. So
let's talk about the book itself. The Book of Kells

(07:14):
is comprised of four Gospels in Latin based on a
Vulgate text. The Vulgate edition was written by St. Jerome
in a d and that is what ultimately became the
definitive Latin version of the Bible. Yeah, and the English
versions that we know are based in turn off of
the Vulgate. It's interesting though this isn't necessarily um about

(07:35):
the Book of Kells, but a lot of the illuminated
manuscripts at the time are not pure Vulgate. Um. Many
Irish trained monks knew earlier translations of the Gospels and
knew them, had had them memorized, and they trusted their
memories more than the model that they were given to coffee.
So there's sort of like freeform Gospels, like transformation of

(07:57):
the Bible. The book was made at the height of
Ireland's Golden Age, and it represented an enormous commitment at
the monastery's time and resources. We've got a lot of
gold involved, a lot of expensive pigments, and lots of monks.
There's just lots of manpower, a really time intensive book.
You cannot get the Book of Kells on your kindle.
And we have to also ask what is it for.
It's an oversized book, heavily ornamented. I mean that cover

(08:20):
originally was gold with jewels all over it. So it's
not made for a private devotional. It's not what you
retreat to your cell with and look over. It's probably
something that would have been carried in ceremonial processions like Easter,
for example, and then placed on an altar facing out
toward the congregation. And I think this is so interesting,

(08:41):
but you have to think, of course, your average member
of a congregation at this time would not know how
to read, and they wouldn't even speak or understand Latin.
They would speak Gaelic. So I'd say that your average
book would not have a lot of power over someone
who was illiterate and spoke a different language. So therefore

(09:02):
you make this book that's so beautiful that it would
have inspired anyone illiterate or not, just with all of
its colors and all of its symmetry and lots of illustration.
Because the monks knew the biblical texts in and out,
they filled these copies with meaning using things other than words.
So instead they use the symbolism of animals like lions

(09:24):
and snakes and peacocks to represent say, the resurrection. The
host is depicted in the mouths of mice or lions.
There's a cross motif on almost every page, m angels
bearing the stigmata pointing at Christ. There are a lot
of intricate and really often humorous, definitelys that make it
really cool to look at. You should definitely go online

(09:44):
and find a bunch of pictures. And I feel like
this is a follow along podcast. You can pull up
images and reference them. Maybe not when you're driving if
you're a commuter listener. So going down into book specifics,
the pages are big, like ten by thirteen inches, and
there are three hundred forty folio six eight pages and

(10:05):
they're written on calf bellum. Probably we're missing about sixty pages,
although one page was recovered in the eighteenth century and
flipped back into the book, which I think is so awesome.
Um the vellum represents about a hundred and eighty five
skins of calves um, so you can imagine just the
work and effort that would go into creating the parchment.

(10:29):
And it's that texture of the parchment that no facimile
can reproduce, even if it's really a great coffee, because
it's thick and leathery in certain spots, and then it's
really been almost to the point of translucence and in others.
And going from pages to script, the letters that make

(10:49):
up the gospels, the prefaces, the summaries of the gospel
narratives are written in this insular's type of writing that's
typical of Scotland, Ireland and Linda's barn at the time,
and it was essentially a Newish type of font and
the variations of it spread throughout Europe by missionaries. But
of course the script doesn't mean anything in the Book
of Kells without the illumination. Yeah, it surrounds all of

(11:12):
the text and there are only two pages in that
whole long thing devoid of ornamentation, which I think is
so amazing. They don't picture book, supposed picture book. They
embellished keywords and key phrases and decorated initials, their drawings
that wrap around the text. It's all perfectly put together
to like a puzzle, which is so interesting when you

(11:35):
think about multiple people working on one page. There's not
work inspired by Celtic metal working and stone crosses and
people lay through the words. You really have to look
this up. But people just with their legs all folded
up in funny Celtic knots and they're tongue tied in
bows and it's it's really interesting, and like we've mentioned before,

(11:59):
the imagination and humor in these drawings. It's not just
stay in religious types of things. The letters seem alive.
There are human figures that are fantastically elongated in part
and pulling each other's beards. Um. A horse rider is
pointing an important part of the text with his toes,
one of my favorite parts. It's like, look at this,

(12:20):
I'm kicking towards it. There's an inebriated, illustrated man who's
sinking against the edge of the page. And there are
tons of animals to lizards and cats and lions, moms, otters, fish, mice, hens, lizards, hounds,
and it's funny too some of the animals. Obviously, the
monks wouldn't have seen these these um you know, monks

(12:42):
on iona kills wherever they are um never would have
seen a lion, for example, and they must have known
kind of how a lion's body was shaped and that
it hit a main But consequently they end up looking
like dogs with these big funny whiskers. But the animals
are used to to indicate things, corrections and additions and

(13:02):
a turn in the path which is kind of a
change in the direction of the text. So they have roles.
And there is feature art as well, complex scenes that
take up whole pages, like the arrest of Christ at
the Temptation of Christ Virgin and child St. Matthew St. John.
But perhaps the most famous is the Cairo, and that

(13:24):
gets us to the illuminators, the people who illustrated the book. Uh.
The historian fran Sis Henry thinks that there are three
principal artists. One is the Goldsmith, and he's probably the
most famous. Here. Of course, we don't know who these
people really are and what their names would have been, um.
But the Goldsmith is considered the great draftsman, and he

(13:45):
didn't draw foliage, but he really liked yellow and blue,
and he probably illustrated that famous Cairo page and earned
his nickname. And if you've ever seen the Cairo this
will makes sense to um. He earned his nickname because
he's really good at creating the effect of gold filigree
on vellum with this yellow color, which was actually Arsenic based.

(14:07):
So we can only guess about the goldsmith's health later
in life, but a really impressive work. And then we've
got the portrait painter who created images of Christ, the
four Evangelists, and maybe the simple page in the St.
Matthew Gospel. And the third is the illustrator who really
like to bright colors and may have been responsible for

(14:28):
the Temptation of Christ, the arrest of Christ, and the
Virgin and Child image. The Virgin and Child I'd say
it is one of the most striking images in the
book too. Um. But it's also believed that there were
four scribes, and they don't get names that are quite
as good as the as the illuminators here, but they're
called just A, B, C, and D. And because their

(14:49):
hands are so similar, I mean, it's hard for an
untrained I like my own to even tell them apart,
but they were probably together and work together in the
same script. Toorrium, hand A uses this typical brown gall ink.
Hand B is this black ink, which I had no idea.

(15:11):
It was a novelty at the time and probably signified
some kind of Mediterranean contact. It's weird to think that
black ink wouldn't be your standard. And hand C is
responsible for lots of the book, according to scholars, and
Handy had a large, confident script that's a little easier
to tell, which you would have to have some confidence

(15:32):
to to to write this stuff. You had to write
quickly on vellum um to keep a nice flow to
this script. And we've talked about how open and clear
this kind of writing is. If you if you understood Latin,
you'd probably be able to read it um. It's not
that cramped, difficult style of writing that you would maybe
expect from the period. And contemporary calligraphers have messed around

(15:56):
with the style of writing and figured out that a
page of script without the decorations, you know, just the
writing might have taken only a few hours. The decoration,
of course, would have taken a lot longer. But it's
interesting to think of how fast you could make a
book of tells, but I still think of writing for
a few hours on one page. How if you made
a mistake, it would just be I think I would

(16:17):
be devastated. I would not be a good scribe. But
there aren't many corrections, or at least there are many
corrections that are are noted. And instead of just scribbling
something out or like what I would probably do, try
to turn it into the right letter, they just superscript
the new letter above the incorrect one and mark out
the old one with a dot in the center, which

(16:38):
consequently makes it look pretty good. So how did they
make this book? If you know there aren't a ton
of corrections and everything. How did it work? We'll talk
a little bit about the actual writing process. Scribes used
quills from feathers of swans or geese, and you can
actually get a pretty good idea of what the scribe
at work might look like. Um, when you see the

(16:59):
image of John the evangelist, who's depicted with his quill
hard at work on the Gospel. And the makers of
the book like to remind their readers what they were reading,
and I would think remind them of of the monk's
own role in Mega Yeah, because I mean, after all,
copying Um, copying the Bible like this is an act

(17:22):
of devotion in itself, and so books appear in the
manuscript more than thirty times. Angels hold them, evangelists Jesus
um just sort of reminding people of that whole larger connection.
The painting was done with fine brushes, probably made from
the fur of the pine martin, which is a weasily

(17:42):
type of animal and kind of cute too. It is
super cute. We google image did lapis Lazily was the
most expensive pigment used. The only known source for it
in the ninth century was one mine in the Ebotic
Shawn area of Afghanistan, so it consequently it cost a fortune.
Traders auld charge whatever they wanted for it, and other

(18:03):
imported pigments from the Mediterranean include the maroon colors and purple,
and there's um. White and red are often derived from
white lead or red lead, another kind of toxic pigment
to be working with. Red could also come from a
pregnant Mediterranean insect, the Kermacoccus vermino, which I just wonder

(18:26):
how people discover stuff like this. If you step on
a bug and you notice some nice red looking ink
come out of it. You don't have to go through
that much trouble at the office. You could get your
green from a vertigree a copper acetate, but this didn't
do as well um over time, since it corrodes the
vellum when it stamp. Because I think sometimes you have
to mix it with you. It might have to be

(18:48):
prepared with vinegar um. But the artists also used tools.
They had rulers and set squares and compasses. Sometimes you
can even see the very very faint trace lines from
the compasses and these templates. And but some of the
illuminations are so small, and there are these intense geometric
designs that have lines that are less than half a

(19:10):
millimeter apart. You wonder how they did this even with tools.
How is it possible? Well, that's why we have Cornell
because Cornell paleontologist John Sisney believes, according to Cornell News,
that the Celtic monks and this is a quote from him,
trained their eyes to cross above the plane of the
manuscript so they could visually superimpose side by side elements

(19:33):
of a replicated pattern and thereby create three D images
that magnified differences between the patterns up to thirty times.
So basically it let them replicate designs across the page
and then also gives some vision that's capable of this
submillimeter precision before you have something like microscopes. I think

(19:54):
this is so crazy. If you cross your eyes and
practice enough. We've been crossing our eyes at each other
there all day. No, I have not gotten this amazing
vision yet. Um. But he called this free fusion stereo comparison,
and it's not something that the Celtic monks would have
shared freely because it kind of gave them a leg

(20:16):
up in the illumination world. Um. But you can tell
because of some clues. One thing is that the element
spacing is usually about the distance between an average person's pupils.
They probably made the templates by drawing a design repeatedly
cutting out airs as they kept on doing it until

(20:38):
they finally have one that's ready. And you can tell
this too, because sometimes you'll see a minor mistake that's
repeated throughout the pattern, throughout the rows and columns, suggesting
that you know they did work from a template. Since
such precision and time can't be replicated today, it's good
that we have some really nice copies eximile He's made

(20:59):
in the eight is involved the invention of its own
special camera. Since the book couldn't leave Trinity, couldn't be unbound,
and couldn't be touched by anyone or anything. Yeah, they
had to invent this camera that had a light section
to press down the pages so that they were flat
enough to photograph. And this copying specximily can re recreate

(21:23):
or recapture every wash of paint in every little beetle hole,
basically everything except the texture of the vellum. It's so fantastic,
and it's so fantastic that Kel's still wants the original
of this book. The city made a push for one
of the manuscripts to return to them and two thousand
and take up a spot in a heritage exhibit that
they've set up um, but the heritage center had to

(21:45):
close because of issues with a leaky roof, So the
city's making another push for a manuscript in the wake
of the Secret of Kell's, an animated film which was
nominated for an Oscar and of course appropriately hand drawn,
which Sarah and I really haven't heard before. The really
want to see it. We also want our own book
of Kels, but that brings us today to our listener mail. So,

(22:08):
keeping with our story about the Book of Kells and
about great Irish folk tales and fairy tales, we have
a correction or a comment from Allison about our episode
on the Real blue Beard, and she wanted to mention
that it was Beauty and the Beast was not written
by Charles Perrol but actually Madame de villinove Um, And yeah,

(22:30):
we wanted to make that clear in case it wasn't.
We We didn't actually think that Charles Perraul wrote the book, right,
We just but we would like to clarify and because
that wasn't clear to everyone else here but Alison it is.
I agree with you. The Beauty and the Beast history
is a really fun one and we're really into fairy
tales in general. So if there's something you'd like to
hear about specifically, please email us at History Podcast at

(22:54):
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(23:14):
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