When she died in 2016, Dr Jennifer O’Reilly left behind a body of published and unpublished work in three areas of medieval studies: the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England; the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; and the early lives of Thomas Becket. In these three areas she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis. This volume brings together nine studies of the Insular Gospel Books. One of them, on the iconography of the St Gall Gospels (Essay 9), was left completed, but unpublished, on the author’s death. It appears here for the first time. The remaining studies, published between 1987 and 2013, examine certain themes and motifs that inform the Gospel Books: their implicit Christology, their harmonisation of the four Gospel accounts, the depiction of Christ crucified, and the portrayal of St John the Evangelist. Two of the Books, the Durham Gospels and the Gospels of Mael Brigte, receive particular attention. (CS1079).

When she died in 2016, Dr Jennifer O’Reilly left behind a body of published and unpublished work in three areas of medieval studies: the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England; the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; and the early lives of Thomas Becket. In these three areas she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis. This volume brings together seventeen essays, published between 1984 and 2013, on the interplay of texts and images in medieval art. Most focus on the manuscript art of early medieval Ireland and England. The first section includes four studies of the Codex Amiatinus, produced in Northumbria in the monastic community of Bede. The second section contains seven essays on the iconography and text of the Book of Kells. In the third section there are five studies of Anglo-Saxon Art, examined in the context of the Benedictine Reform. A concluding essay, on the medieval iconography of the two trees in Eden, traces the development of a motif from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages.(CS1080)

In this ingenious study, Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced images led to the creation of new multimedia objects. Rudy then travels to the nineteenth century to examine the phenomenon of manuscript books being pillaged for their prints and drawings: she has diligently tracked down the dismembered parts of this book of hours for the first time. Image, Knife, and Gluepot also documents Rudy’s twenty-first-century research process, as she hunts through archives while grappling with the logistics and occasionally the limits of academic research. This is a timely volume, focusing on questions of materiality at the forefront of medieval and literary studies. Beautifully illustrated throughout, its use of original material and its striking interdisciplinary approach, combining book and art history, make it a significant academic achievement. Image, Knife, and Gluepot is a valuable text for any scholar in the fields of medieval studies, the history of early books and publishing, cultural history or material culture. Written in Rudy’s inimitable style, it will also be rewarding for any student enrolled in a course on manuscript production, as well as non-specialists interested in the afterlives of manuscripts and prints. The Royal Society of Edinburgh has generously contributed to this Open Access publication. Due to the number and quality of the images in this book, we have provided the option of a more expensive hardback edition, printed on the best quality paper available, in order to present the images as clearly and beautifully as possible. We hope this range of options — the freely available PDF, HTML and XML editions; the economically priced EPUB, MOBI and paperback editions; and the more expensively printed hardback — will satisfy everyone. Furthermore the HTML edition allows readers to magnify the images of the manuscripts displayed in the book.

The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples. Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the sixteenth century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion's most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas. But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel. In 2021, 1,500 years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But its critics need not relax any more than believers ought to despair. After the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance. In the ruins of the church, new Patricks and Columbas shape the rise of another Christian Ireland.

This up-to-date, reliable introductory account and interpretation of early medieval art combines art, history, and ideas from around 600 to 1050. Diebold describes diversity and complexity of early medieval art by examining the relationship of word and image. The concept of word and image is broad enough to encompass the Anglo-Saxon art and oral cu

Distilling a decade of research by leading experts on the Venerable Bede, Bede the scholar investigates the Northumbrian monk’s place within the wider intellectual developments of the early medieval world. Demonstrating the centrality of the Bible to his scholarship, chapters focus on Bede’s engagement with scriptural languages, his knowledge and use of earlier works of Latin literature, and a pastoral commitment to teaching and preaching. The book breaks new ground for our understanding of Bede’s self image by investigating his famous Ecclesiastical history of the English people alongside lesser-known works such as the Martyrology, the commentary On Genesis, and the chapter headings he developed for different parts of the Vulgate Bible. Contributors highlight the importance of appreciating Bede’s work within its local setting: the kingdom of Northumbria and the monastery of Wearmouth, whose founders, Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith, inspired Bede in various ways. The monastery provided an environment in which Bede could flourish, and where he contributed to an intellectual enterprise which also generated the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest one-volume Vulgate to survive fully intact. Combining rigorous scholarly research with a celebration of the depth and complexity of Bede’s work, Bede the scholar deepens our understanding of the scholarly programme undertaken by one of the most important intellectual figures of the early middle ages.

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the monetary logic that guided the payment of wergild and blood money in early medieval conflict resolution. In the early middle ages, wergild played multiple roles: it was used to measure a person’s status, to prevent and end conflicts, and to negotiate between an individual and the agents of statehood. This collection of interlocking essays by historians, philologists and jurists represents a major contribution to the study of law and society in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. Contributors are Lukas Bothe, Warren Brown, Stefan Esders, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Paul Hyams, Tom Lambert, Ralph W. Mathisen, Rob Meens, Han Nijdam, Lisi Oliver, Harald Siems, Karl Ubl, and Helle Vogt. See inside the book.

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King AEthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.

This book teaches the reader how to look at medieval art–which aspects of architecture, sculpture, or painting are important and for what reasons. It includes the art and building of what is now Western Europe from the second to the fifteenth centuries.

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.