The Lindisfarne Gospels

 The brightest historians have been trying to tell us, for a century and more, that the Dark Ages weren't so completely dark, and they keep pointing to Dark Age Ireland and England as examples of that, and the best examples of what they're talking about which I've found so far are the spectacularly illuminated books made in Dark Age Britain and Ireland. The most celebrated example of these is probably the Book of Kells. Other famous pieces of insular illumination ("insular" referring to the islands of Britain and Ireland, and "illumination" to the decoration) are the Echternach Gospels, ca AD 690; the Book of Durrow, ca AD 650-700; and the Codex Amiatinus, ca AD 700, the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible.

But to me, the fairest of them all are the Lindisfarne Gospels, and my favorite page of that volume is Folio 3r:

The colors remind me of stained glass. 

Besides a tremendous amount of color and imagery, imagery which, in the style typical of insular illumination, draws both on Christianity and on pre-Christian Celtic culture, the volume contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in a version referred to as the "insular Vulgate," which has a higher admixture of readings from the Old Latin than do some other versions of Jerome's Vulgate, and higher than that which eventually became the Catholic Church's standard version, commissioned at the Council of Trent in  the 16th century.

The volume is generally agreed to have been made around AD 700 in Lindisfarne in northeastern England, by a monk named Eadfrith, who became Bishop of Lindisfarne in 698. Recently, however, some authorities have argued for a later date, and for Ireland as the manuscript's origin. I do not know nearly enough to be able to weigh in on this controversy. 

According to the traditional account of things, still widely accepted, the Lindisfarne Gospels were made as a tribute to St Cuthbert (c634-687), who was very deeply revered in the region in his own time, and would be made more widely famous by Bede's Ecclesiatical History. In AD 795, Lindisfarne was raided by Vikings, and the traditional story is that monks from Lindisfarne carried this volume around with them as they wandered homeless for quite a long time after their abbey had been destroyed. Whatever actually happened to the Lindisfarne Gospels in the Dark and Middle Ages, it can be said with somewhat more confidence that Robert Cotton, one of the greatest collectors of English historical documents, owned the volume around AD 1600, and that it was given to the British Museum when that institution was founded in 1753, and it belongs to the British Library today. 

I have never actually seen the Lindisfarne Gospels. I would have to go to London to see the volume, and even then, there is very little chance that I was see it other than through a very thick pane of glass. I have seen pictures of it, in books and online, and I have spent some time wondering which of those photographs more accurately represent its appearance. 

Given its (generally accepted, I believe) date of ca AD 700, I was surprised at first not to find this manuscript being cited among the witnesses for the 4th edition, 1994, of the Stuttgart Vulgate. But then I examined the list of witnesses for the New Testament in the Stuttgart Vulgate a bit more closely, and saw to my surprise that almost half of them are actually older than AD 700. I'm used to looking at lists of manuscripts of works of Classical Latin, where one single manuscript as old as that is quite sensational, and the Bible is an entirely different ballgame.

However, there is one linguistic aspect where the importance of the Lindisfarne Gospels reigns supreme. Take a look at the photo in this post. You see all of those words in tiny print between the lines? Those words are between the lines all throughout the volume, all throughout all four Gospels. They were added to the volume in the 10th century. They are a word-for-word gloss in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, of the Latin text. It's just a gloss, not a complete stand-alone translation in correct Anglo-Saxon syntax; still, it makes the Lindisfarne Gospels the oldest surviving manuscript of an English Biblical translation. 

Isidore of Seville

Almost all of the works written in Latin which are the subject of Classical Studies were written by non-Christians. As far as I know, all but one were written in the very early 5th century AD or earlier. And then there is the Etymologiae, written more than two centuries later by Saint Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who is usually depicted in paintings and other artwork holding a book.

Isidore was born ca AD 560, became Archbishop of Seville around 600, died in 636, was made a Catholic saint in 1598. He wrote many things which today are read mostly by theologians and historians of 6th-and 7th-century Spain -- and then there is his best-known work, the Etymologiae, an encyclopaedia in 20 books. Isidore worked on the Etymologiae for decades, was still working on it at the end of his life, and entrusted it to his friend Bishop Braulio of Saragossa, to finish it after his death.

Book 1 has to do with grammar, Book 2 rhetoric and dialectic, Book 3 mathematics, music and astronomy, Book 4 medicine, Book 5 law, Book 6 Christian books and Church offices, Book 7 God, angels and saints, Book 8 various Christian sects -- or, from Isidore's point of view, heresies, Book 9 languages and nations, Book 10 vocabulary, Book 11 the human body, Book 12 animals, Book 13 the cosmos, Book 14 the Earth, Book 15 buildings and fields, Book 16 stones and metals, Book 17 life in rural areas, Book 18 war and sports, Book 19 ships, buildings and tools, and Book 20 with miscellaneous supplies and implements.

It is called the Etymologiae, the Etymologies, after the 10th of these 20 books, and -- as in the cases of earlier authors like Valerius Maximuns, Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Quintilian, Macrobius and Servius, some of them also greatly prized as authors in their own right, others of them less so -- it is of great interest to Classical scholars because it quotes many pre-Christian authors, and in many cases it preserves passages from these authors which are otherwise lost.

Isidore is a great example of how there are exceptions to rules, and how things aren't always as simple as they seem. Almost all of the Classical Latin literature known to us today was copied at some point by Medieval Christian monks. However, by and large, the Dark Ages -- the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the time between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 and the coronation as Emperor of Charlemagne in 800 -- were indeed quite dark to anyone interested in the preservation of ancient Latin literature. A very great amount of what we estimate to have been the finest of that literature disappeared during the Dark Ages, and to a great extent, it disappeared because a greater emphasis was given to the preservation of Christian literature. And yet, a significant amount of it has survived because of Isidore, a Christian archbishop living right in the middle of the Dark Ages, a contemporary of Pope Gregory the Great. Isidore, who was by no means a Christian in name only, taking advantage of a cushy Church position in order to pursue Classical Studies. Isidore, who took a very active part in shaping the Christian theology and politics of his time.

It's true that a great deal of what Isidore compiled is taken from earlier compilers. Isidore takes quite a lot, for example, from Servius. (Servius (late 4th century -- early 5th century) called his work, which is thousands of pages long, a commentary on Vergil; others have opined that it is in fact an encyclopaedia which happens to be arranged in the order of passages from Vergil). But it's also true that Isidore took much of his material from manuscripts of individual Classical authors -- for instance, if we are to believe David Butterfield, The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Cambridge: 2013, pp 89-91, and I think we ought to, Isidore had a complete manuscript of Lucretius' Epicurean poem, a work which some have alleged was shunned by the entire Christian world between Antiquity and the Renaissance. If the many passages from Lucretius in the Etymologiae don't already make Isidore's high esteem for Lucretius clear, he has given us another big hint in the title of one his other works: De natura rerum. A Dark Age archbishop and future saint made it plain, in a work which was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages, a work of which more than a thousand Medieval manuscripts survive (a thousand is a lot), that he held Lucretius in very high esteem.

Things are definitely not always so simple and clear-cut as some would have you believe.

The Terms "Dark Ages" And "Renaissance"

In this post, and on this blog in general, I use (and fully intend to continue to use) the term "Dark Ages" to denote the period between AD 476 and 800 in Western, Latin-Speaking Europe -- the period between the abdication of the Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus and the crowning of the Western Emperor Charlemagne. I use the term "Middle Ages" to designate the entire period between the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the (for lack of a better term. See below) "Renaissance."

But apparently, if I were taking an exam or writing a dissertation, my grade might suffer if I were to use the term "Dark Ages" instead of "Early Middle Ages," and I might be accused of Eurocentrism.

PC academic fashion be damned, I think it's ridiculous to call the term "Dark Ages" Eurocentric. The term isn't used to refer to any region except Latin Europe, and doesn't imply that darkness had sunk upon any other parts of the world.

Now the term "Renaissance" is quite Eurocentric, and centered not even on all of Europe but only Western Europe. Saying that Classical Greek culture was "reborn" because it was noticed again in Western Europe ignores the fact that it was never forgotten by the Greeks themselves, and also flourished in parts of the Islamic world. That's the height of Eurocentricism, which one also sees whenever someone says "Christendom" and is referring only to the Catholic/Protestant part of Christendom, as if Orthodox and Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Ethiopic and other branches of Christianity had never existed.

Typically, Western historians somehow manage to continue to ignore the direct impetus given to the Western re-discovery of Greece by Greek scholars fleeing to Italy from the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. Reading histories of Renaissance Europe, it seems as if Greek were somehow revived entirely by Westerners from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus, and the contributions of Greeks like Demetrius Chalcondyles and John Argyropoulos are rarely mentioned. It's utterly (Western-)Eurocentric, and downright rude.

One doesn't frequently encounter an outcry, here at the Western world, against such usage of terms like "Renaissance" and "Christendom," unless one reads top-notch stuff like the works of Runciman, and this blog.

So far I haven't heard of any trends toward abolishing or improving upon the term "Renaissance" in academia.

But then, I haven't attended grad school since 1992. (There are times when I'm very glad I haven't.)

The Dark Ages And Ancient Latin

In a piece I posted on this blog in August, I mentioned that my search for traces of the missing books of Livy went cold, very cold, in the late 6th century. I feel a little silly now, reading L D Reynolds' introduction to Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics,a collaborative work of 14 Classical scholars which describes the most important known manuscripts of the texts of 134 ancient Latin authors and the ways in which the printed versions of those texts came to be made from those manuscripts, and learning that Livy is absolutely typical of ancient Latin authors in this regard: many of their texts disappeared around that time. The 7th century represents the darkest of the Dark Ages when it comes to the transmission, the passing down, of ancient Latin texts. As Reynolds puts it on p xv, referring to nothing else but the transmission of ancient Latin: "By the time the sixth century had reached its mid-course the Dark Ages had come, and they seem to have come with a vengeance." On p xvi he illustrates his point with some striking figures: we possess only 264 7th-century Latin manuscripts, even defining the 7th century very generously to include manuscripts which may have been made either in the late 6th or early 7th century, or in the late 7th or early 8th century. 264 is a tiny number compared to the number of manuscripts from later centuries. For example, there are 330 15th-century manuscripts just of the work of the author Sallust. Of those 264, only 26 are secular, that is, something other than books of the Bible or Christian prayers or theology or things which otherwise have to do with Christianity. Of those 26, 8 manuscripts have to do with law, 8 with medicine, 6 with grammar and 1 with surveying, 1 contains excerpts from Vegetius' book on military matter, 1 was made in Spain and is a miscellany of mostly Spanish authors, and 1 contains a fragment of Lucan's poem about the Civil War in late republican Rome.

That's all 26. 24 manuscripts of very little literary interest, 1, the Vegetius, of middling literary interest, and then Lucan, usually classed as a minor classical author. As I was reading p xvi I kept saying to myself, "[...]and a palimpsest of Gellius. And Gellius. There's a 7th-century manuscript of a fragment of Gellius' work," but no. Professor Ihm, in the apparatus to his 1901 edition of Gellius (an author who to this day, like Lucan, is read somewhat more often and with more enjoyment than, say, Vegetius.), an edition with which I was familiar, describes the palimpsest manuscript, Vatican pal Lat 24, as "s VII (?)." Ihm was guessing that this was a 7th-century manuscript and making it clear that this was a guess. P K Marshall, in Texts and Transmission, published in 1983, says it was made in the 4th century, no ifs, ands or buts about it (p 176). I believe that the experts got much better at dating manuscripts between 1901 and 1983, and that we can trust Professor Marshall when he says that Vatican pal Lat 24 is a 4th-century manuscript. I don't know enough about paeleography to tell you in any detail why I think it's safe to go ahead and trust Marshall on this issue, but I do. Trust me, or look into these things for yourself. (I hadn't realized it, but Vatican pal Lat 24 is the very same manuscript which also contains the palimpsest passage of book 91 of Livy which I've mentioned a few times in this blog, and some other noteworthy palimpsest classical fragments as well.)

Marshall's clarification of the date of this, the oldest known manuscript of Gellius, is very much a mixed thing: from a purely practical point of view, with a concern for re-creating a text of Gellius which is as close as possible to what the author intended to say, 4th century, all other things being equal, is much better than 7th century. All other things being equal when it comes to establishing the text, older, closer to the time of the original composition, is better. And 4th century is much older than 7th from an editor's point of view.

On the other hand, there are so many 4th century manuscripts of the Latin classics laying around, and so few from the 7th century. And, it turns out, one less than I had thought until now. 7th century manuscripts of the classics are like black swans. If you think of it as classics versus Christians, and there are plenty of good reasons to think of it that way, then a 7th century manuscript of a classical author is a treasure rescued from the belly of the beast, from the very center of the darkness of the Dark Ages. 4th century is far better for editing the text, but back when people thought Vatican pal Lat 24 was 7th-century, the manuscript seemed like an impossibly exotic object.

Charlemagne either couldn't read or couldn't read very well, although he began at an advanced age to diligently study reading and writing. And, of huge importance to the study of ancient Latin, he threw his huge influence into the advancement of education, and so by the 9th century the Dark Ages are over -- the Middle Ages continue until the Renaissance -- and 9th century manuscripts of the classics far outnumber ones from the 4th and 5th century, and with each century the number of manuscripts made which we know today grows, until the 15th century, and printing.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part II, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

By the way, that "Clearly Hampered[...]" in the post title is not meant to be flip or sarcastic. The "History of the World" is the sarcastic part. A lot of "Histories of the World" have been written, and a lot of histories of Western civilization which are not much different, or actually more all-encompassing. I'm very ignorant of the majority of the world which lies outside of the scope of Western civilisation, and I'm a pretty typical Westerner in that regard. I've begun to learn a little about the rest of the world but it's just been baby steps.

So if you're understanding me clearly, my referring to these modest posts as a "History of the World" will make you smile wryly. What I'm trying to do here is to make some very general remarks about what I believe I know about certain things I find interesting. This is in part an exercise for me to see how well I can summarize some things. It is one of the quirks of the culture in which I live is that such remarks are sometimes referred to as world history. There is a lot of hubris in our culture.

To back up chronologically from the end of Part I of the Condensed Version: By several tens of thousand of years ago, humans had migrated from Africa into Asia, Europe and Oceania.

If you want to start an argument, bring together several dozen anthropologists and archaeologists selected entirely at random and bring up the question of when humans first migrated to the Western Hemisphere. That should start a nice vigorous argument for you.

Most anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that humans crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska 10 or 12 thousand years or so ago. The disagreements begin when the questions are: did humans come to the Western Hemisphere earlier than that? How much earlier? Did they come by other routes in addition to the land bridge? Perhaps by boat across the Pacific from Asia?

Archaeologist A will present an object and say it is an artifact formed by human hands in the Wesern Hemisphere 20, or 30, or 40, or 60 or 60 thousand years ago. Archaeologist B will regard this statement by Archaeologist A and assert that it shows that A is engaged in wishful thinking as opposed to science, and that the object occurred naturally and show no evidence of having been shaped by human hands.

I don't know whom I should believe.

Meanwhile, back in Western Civ.: after the hegemonies of the Sumerians and Egyptians and Babylonians and Hittites and Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians and Persians, Alexander the Great created the Hellenistic world by conquering land as far eastward from Greece as Afghanistan and parts of India. His vast empire fragmented after his death, but in many parts of it the rulers continued to be Greek for a while. Meanwhile, both east and west of Egypt, as far west as Spain certainly, the Phoenicians had an empire as well. They were good sailors, and some people have speculated that in ancient times they sailed to the Western Hemisphere, although that seems extremely far-fetched to me. The Phoenicians had been a major power at least as far back as the eighth century BC, but not long after Alexander, who ruled his empire in the second half of the fourth century BC, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks, had a new rival for control of the Mediterranean: the Romans. In the third and seconds centuries BC Rome, which as late as 500 BC had been not much more than a village which managed to throw off the overlordship of the Etruscans, finished conquering the Italian peninsula, then conquered Phoenicia and Greece. In 30 BC the last bit of Mediterranean coastline not yet in Roman hands passed to them from Egypt, from Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh and a descendant of one of Alexander's generals.

The Israelites had rebelled against the Greek successors of Alexander, and they rebelled against the Romans. In AD 70 the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, and in 73 AD the Jewish revolt came to an end when the Romans took the fortress of Masada. In the next several centuries Christianity, a sect arising from Judaeism, gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire until in the fourth century AD it became the official state religion and all other religions began to be persecuted and stamped out. In the fifth century Germanic tribes overran the western part of the Empire, and from this point on, only the eastern part continuously survived, until AD 1453. In a major example of the Western hubris I referred to above, to this day many otherwise well-educated Weserners continue to refer to the end of the weserrn part of the Roman Empire as the end of the Roman Empire, and refer to the surviving eastern part as Byzantium, as if it were not in fact the Roman Empire.

Things went very poorly in the West for several centuries which we usually, and I think quite rightly, call the Dark Ages. Some people use the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" synonymously. I think it makes more sense to use "Dark Ages" for the period between 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Emperor, surrendered to Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain, and 800, when Charlemagne, in an act by no means free of unrealistic connotations, was crowned Emperor by the Pope, and to use the term "Middle Ages" to describe the entire time between the fal of the western part of the Empire until the Rennaissance: say, 1350 in Italy, and later as you head north.

End of Part II of the Condensed Version