There are more ancient Bibles at Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, the splendid new exhibition at the British Library, than most of us will ever have seen in one place.
Side by side are two contrasting 8th-century Scriptures: a palm-sized Gospel of John known as the St Cuthbert Gospel because it was found in his coffin, and an absolutely massive Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, which takes two people to lift. Taken to Italy from Wearmouth-Jarrow in AD 716 as a gift for the pope, this is the first time the Codex Amiatinus has returned to Britain in more than 1,300 years.
There’s a host of gorgeously illustrated Bibles, some with gold-plated paintings, others with almost comic-strip illustrations. The exhibition is full of firsts. The beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels are the earliest surviving English translation of the gospels. There’s the earliest copy of the Rule of St Benedict, from around AD 700; the earliest manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from the late 9th century; an early 11th-century copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People; and the only known medieval manuscript of Beowulf.
English developed from the melting pot of invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes. King Alfred (871-99) sought to raise its standard to equal Latin. We think of dictionaries as being fairly recent, but even before Alfred there’s an Eighth-Century Anglo-Saxon/Latin Glossary. The Venerable Bede wrote: “We should turn into the language that we can all understand those books most necessary for all men to know.” That was centuries before the Church accepted that the Bible should be in the vernacular.
The exhibition is mainly about texts – this is the British Library, after all – but there are recent archaeological finds of jewellery and of a stone angel from Lichfield Cathedral, as well as a replica of the 17ft-tall Ruthwell Cross.
Anglo-Saxon science was further developed than we might think: a startling quotation from Bede, from AD 725, reads: “The Earth is a sphere, set in the middle of the universe. It is not circular like a shield or spread out like a wheel, but looks round, like a ball.”
A recipe for an eye salve in the 10th-century Bald’s Leechbook has recently been found to be effective against the antibiotic-resistant bacterium MRSA – though the same work has remedies against elves and night-time goblin visitors.
Anglo-Saxon Britain was well organised. The astonishing speed of the compilation of the Domesday Book (exhibited here), between Christmas 1085 and August 1086, was because England – one country for over a century – already had a well-established administrative structure, the shire system which remained until local government reorganisation in 1974.
For anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon history or in illuminated Bibles and prayer books, even if unable to visit the exhibition, the accompanying book (£40 hb, £25 pb) is a beautifully illustrated treasury of information.
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War is at the British Library, London, until February 19
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