The Eighth Century and All That
The life and times of Pepin le Bref
You may have heard of that amazing manuscript known as the Book of Kells. I’ve talked about it here and here. If you want more Kells (and who doesn’t?), Trinity College Dublin, where the manuscript is housed, is offering a free, four-week, online course. You can get all the details at their site:
Should be fun!
Recently a reader posed one of those inherently fundamental questions that never occur to someone like me, who is buried in this stuff all the time.
Writing is so fragile – how did any of these primary sources survive? An excellent question. The quickest answer is that everything was written on a surprisingly robust medium, which was then stored away and forgotten. Survival!
Virtually all of our primary source material was written down on vellum, which is calf skin that has been treated and stretched. This material is far more robust than paper, which in any case didn’t make it to western Europe until the eleventh century. Early medieval scribes used two types of inks, one based in carbon and one in iron. Both produced a rich, long-lasting dark lettering. The manuscripts were bound with heavy leather or even wood, when the manuscript was particularly valuable. As long as you keep the manuscript reasonably dry, protected from rats, and away from flames, it will last a long time.
I’ve updated the Map page with some maps that may be of interest and use. As I come across others I’ll include those. I think the one I need next is the locations of the bishoprics, particularly as those changed over time. Let me know if there’s anything you would like to see, and I’ll start digging.
In the closing years of the seventh century, behind the walls of the priory of Lindisfarne, a monk named Eadfrith created a masterpiece. He wrote and ‘painted’ a gospel book (a book of the four gospels of the new testament, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John). Such books had been produced before, and would be produced again. But nothing like Eadfrith’s gospel book has ever been seen.
Lindisfarne is a tidal island on the eastern shore of England, just south of the Scottish border. Saint Aiden, an Irish monk, founded a priory there sometime in the first third of the seventh century. No doubt he was taken by the remote aspect of the island, which is approachable only during low tide. The Venerable Bede describes the island’s church as built “of hewn oak, thatched with reeds after the Irish manner. … But Eadbert, a later Bishop of Lindisfarne, removed the thatch, and covered both roof and walls with sheets of lead.”1.Bede, Ecclesiastical History, ch.25, p.186. Eadbert was bishop while Eadfrith was a monk, and so it is doubtful if Eadfrith toiled under any roof grander than thatch. No doubt it was damp, cold, and dark.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Bede, Ecclesiastical History, ch.25, p.186. |
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O Constantine, what evil did you sire,
not by your conversion, but by the dower
that the first wealthy Father got from you!1.Dante, The Inferno, trans. Mark Musa, canto 19, lines 115-117, p.244.
Such was Dante’s lament as he surveyed the ditch of the Simonists, head down in flaming pits. He believed that the corruption and greed of the 14th century church could be laid at the feet of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who, in a grand gesture of piety in 335, donated (there’s that word again) all of Italy to the church and the popes that would lead her. That wealth, Dante believed, created a culture of ecclesiastical greed that had infected and weakened the church in his own time.
The pledge in question is called the Donation of Constantine, for that emperor who converted to Christianity in 317 AD. He later moved the capital of the empire to the ancient city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. The Donation is a document of some 4700 words, in twenty chapters, and it is written in the first person, allegedly by Constantine himself. In the first eleven chapters the author lays out the foundations of Christian theology, and relates the miraculous healing of “a mighty and foul leprosy” that led to his conversion. Pope Sylvester, the man who led him through his experience, is addressed frequently, as are “all his successors, the pontiffs who are about to sit upon the chair of Saint Peter until the end of time…”2.Donation of Constantine, in Carolingian Civilization, A Reader, ch.1, p.14.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Dante, The Inferno, trans. Mark Musa, canto 19, lines 115-117, p.244. |
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| ↑2 | Donation of Constantine, in Carolingian Civilization, A Reader, ch.1, p.14. |