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The Book of Kells: Two Works, Two Scribes
Dr. Bernard Meehan of Trinity College, Dublin, the leading scholar regarding The Book of Kells, has, via new research, concluded that Kells was originally two separate works, created up to half a century apart on the islands of Kells and Iona. Meehan theorizes that the Gospel of John and the first few pages of Mark were created by a scribe on the Scottish island of Iona sometime during the last quarter of the eighth century. He suggests that the remainder of The Gospel of Mark and the Kells texts of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were created up to 50 years later in the Irish monastery of Kells itself. Handwriting evidence suggests…
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Christmas and Xmas
I noticed an online acquaintance the other day becoming extremely agitated that someone had referred to Christmas using the colloquialism Xmas. She felt that this was insulting, and offensive in the extreme. What she didn’t realize was that Xmas as a shortened form for Christmas has a venerable (and solidly Christian) history. The word Christmas is a compound of Christ + mass; we see it first in Old English in the form Cristes mæsse in 1038, according to the OED. The Old English form eventually evolved to the Middle English Christemasse. The word Christ is derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning “anointed,” a literal translation of the Hebrew cognate of messiah. Mass, as in the Christian ritual, derives from Middle English masse,…
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XPI autem generatio: The Book of Kells and the Chi-Rho Page
The Chi-Rho page in the Book of Kells isprThanks to the lovely film The Secret of Kells, large numbers of people who have never taken an art history class or studied paleography now know about The Book Of Kells. For those who haven’t seen the film, go now and watch it. The Book of Kells is a medieval manuscript created by monastics in the ninth century, and presently resides in Trinity College Library, in Dublin. It’s a beautifully illuminated version of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) with the customary additions like the canon tables. The real point of the Book of Kells is not so much the…
