![]() ![]() However, this connection led to the book’s veneration as a relic. ![]() 247r, the Irish saint lived a century prior to the manuscript’s date. While it has been attributed to Colum Cille (Columba) due to a colophon added on fol. It predates the Lindisfarne Gospels by a generation and only a fragmentary page from a Northumbrian gospel book predates it. ![]() The Book of Durrow is the oldest complete Insular gospel book to survive. Spiral motifs have roots in Celtic decoration from the Bronze Age, animal and human forms are drawn from Pictish stone carving and the woven interlace and keys have Mediterranean origins. The zoomorphic interlace derives from the Migration period in northern Europe. This early work makes clear the fusion of disparate decorative motifs and designs, aspects of which would fuse into the Insular style. The Book of Durrow is one of the oldest examples of the Insular style, which would dominate artistic production in the British Isles for the next three centuries. Its extraordinary decoration and influence make this manuscript essential in the study of early medieval art. However, the association of symbol to evangelist follows the pre-Vulgate tradition of St Ireneus: Matthew – Man, Eagle – Mark, Calf – Luke, and Lion – John. A page featuring the four evangelist symbols is placed at the beginning of the manuscript and a page dedicated to individual evangelist symbols precedes its respective Gospel. In addition to the decorated text, the Book of Durrow also contains eleven full-page illuminations: six interlaced carpet pages and five figural illustrations. It was once housed in a silver reliquary case. The Latin gospel text and prefatory material are written in Insular semi-uncial with significant decorated lettering beginning each section. It is the product of an Irish monastic scriptorium in the northern British Isles, either in Durrow, Iona, or Lindisfarne. Created in the second half of the seventh century, it is the oldest complete Insular gospel book and provides insight into the development of the Insular style. Columba, the Book of Durrow is an important manuscript for its incredible artwork and cultural significance. It was a pleasure to have been able to make it happen and to have been part of it.A work venerated as a relic of St. “One of those occasions when many people, not least the owners of the book, were working together towards a common purpose for the cause of pure learning. “The discovery and digitisation of the text was a scholarly adventure,” said Ó Macháin. It can now be seen on the Irish Script on Screen website. The book’s owners agreed that the binding should be removed, opened out and digitised. Books like these were destroyed, and others were damaged and cut up, and it’s in that wider context you have to see whoever owned this book clearly came into possession of some such manuscript and thought nothing of trimming it and making a binding of it,” he said. “Early universities in Ireland, supported by the Gaelic lordships, that all fell asunder as the Elizabethan conquest proceeded. It would have been cut up, he said, following the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, which put an end to the old Gaelic society. “The reason was translated was that Irish was the language of learning in medieval Ireland, whereas Latin fulfilled that role everywhere else,” he said. Ó Macháin said that medical scholarship in medieval Gaelic Ireland was on a par with that practised on the continent, with evidence of Irish scholars travelling to European medical schools and bringing their learning back to Ireland. And it is for that reason that we have called the bones that are in the nose … a helping instrument, for it is through them that the superfluities are expelled, like the blowing of a bellows.” It details in particular the “three uses” of the bones of the nose: “to retain the air in its vacuum to strengthen the brain constantly”, to help “to articulate the sound of every letter”, and “the third use: the superfluities that are expelled from the brain, part of them nourish the nose and the remainder is expelled from it as a superfluity. The Irish fragment includes parts of the opening chapters, tackling the physiology of the jaw, the nose and the back, with the section on the nose the least fragmentary. Sīna’s Canon of Medicine was a medical encyclopaedia which was seen as the standard medical text in the Islamic world and across Europe for more than six centuries. ![]()
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