An illuminated manuscript is a book written and painted entirely by hand, its pages decorated with gold or silver and bright colors. Manuscript means "written by hand," and illuminated comes from the Latin illuminare, "to light up."
These books were made on animal skin, in the centuries before printing. The best known of them is the Book of Kells, made around the year 800.
The Book of Kells holds the four Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, in Latin. They fill 340 leaves, the sheets of the book, each written on both sides. Since the seventeenth century the manuscript has been kept at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland's oldest university.
Its most famous page opens Matthew's account of the birth of Christ. Two Greek letters, Chi and Rho, written X and P, fill almost the whole leaf. They begin Christ's name in Greek, and scribes used them as a shorthand for that name.
Around them, spirals and knotted bands cover every inch of the page. Near the bottom, small animals hide in the pattern: an otter holding a fish, and two cats watching a pair of mice.
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Such a page matches the picture most people have of medieval manuscripts: a monk bent over a desk, copying the Gospels. Yet in this case nobody can say for certain where that monk worked.
Most scholars favor Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland and home to a community of monks. In 806 a Viking raid killed 68 of them. The survivors are believed to have fled to Kells, in Ireland, and to have carried on the work there.
So the origin stays open. The book may have been made wholly at Iona, wholly at Kells, or begun on the island and finished in Ireland. Kells kept it for centuries and gave it its name, but no document settles the matter.
What illumination means
Not every handwritten book counts as illuminated…
What You'll Discover
The Paris shop that worked for a king.
What one Bible cost in animal skins.
What the gold on the page was for.
Why knights keep fighting snails in the margins.
The medieval bestseller you can still see today.