Michelle P. Brown

The Lichfield Angel and the Manuscript Context: Lichfield as a Centre of Insular Art

Abstract It has long been surmised that Lichfield, which at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th centuries even served as Englands third archbishopric for a time, may have been a notable centre of religious culture. None the less, the sites traumatic history of despoliation by Viking and puritanical Civil War forces has led to an absence of artworks in situ or of early archives. The recent excavation by Warwick Rodwell of what is thought to be the shrine of St Chad, including the carefully deposited remains of an imposing sculptural slab depicting an angel has gone some considerable way towards rectifying such lacunae. The angel probably formed half of an Annunciation panel which acted as a gable end from a stone house-shaped tomb, for which formal and stylistic parallels are here adduced. These would suggest a date for the piece of late 8th or early 9th century, a time when kings Offa and Coenwulf of Mercia were both patronising Lichfield. Remarkably, the angel retains much of its original polychrome pigmentation and the unusual palette, consisting of shades of purple, white and black—not the most obvious colours to use for stone sculpture—raises interesting connections with two manuscripts that have been associated with early Lichfield: the Lichfield Gospels and the Book of Cerne. This paper goes on to explore the relationship between these works and concludes that the Lichfield Gospels was made during the mid-8th century, probably at Lindisfarne but for another centre which is likely to have been Chad of Lindisfarnes shrine at his foundation of Lichfield. This book features a palette of purples and white, perhaps prompted by Bedan exegesis, and the stone sculptures added to Chads shrine around 800 may have been coloured similarly to complement the Gospelbook. The Book of Cerne, probably made for Bishop Aethelwald of Lichfield (818–30) also features these colours, inter alia, and its St John evangelist symbol offers the closest analogy for the treatment of the angels plumage, further reinforcing the likelihood of a Lichfield origin for this important prayerbook.

The Lichfield/Llandeilo Gospels Reinterpreted

Scholarship concerning the great Gospelbooks that are amongst the leading cultural monuments of the “Insular” period of British and Irish history, ca. 550–850, has grown apace during the course of the past century and a half. It has been interlaced with a reawakening of regional and national identities and with a developing sense of the value of such cultural artifacts as iconic rallying points. The pendulum of intellectual debate has accordingly swung wildly between extremist positions in which swathes of interrelated materials have been claimed as entirely the product of one nation or another, within this cluster of isles. Thus the Hiberno-Saxon Gospelbooks, notably the Book of Durrow, the Book of Kells, the Durham Gospels, the Echternach Gospels, and the Lindisfarne Gospels have generally been claimed for England and Scotland by Masai, Kendrick, Bruce-Mitford, and Julian Brown and for Ireland by Henry, William O’Sullivan, Daibhi O Croinin, and Bernard Meehan. Others, such as George Henderson, Nancy Netzer, and myself, have adopted a more nuanced approach, favoring a spread of production centers across all three areas at a time when their religious cultures often collaborated in the shared work of conversion and construction, the very term “Insular” serving as a convenient shorthand to obviate the necessity of drawing arbitrary national distinctions.1

Writing in the Insular world

The books made by Insular monks and nuns during the earlier fifth century stand as monument to their contribution to the transmission of scripture, to the preservation of elements of the cultures of northern European prehistory and of the Graeco-Roman world, and to the transition from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Display scripts are a striking feature of Insular book production. The illuminated incipit page reached its zenith in the great Insular gospel books, wherein it formed an essential part of the programme of decoration. A successive fusion of Uncials and New Roman cursive would similarly give rise to fully developed half-Uncial as a more economical solution to the need for a legible, prestigious book script. The use of minuscule scripts also characterises the later members of the Southumbrian Tiberius group of manuscripts such as the Royal Prayerbook, the Book of Nunnaminster and the Book of Cerne.

When Illuminated Manuscripts are not What They Seem: the Cases of the Holkham Bible Picture Book and a Newly Discovered Croatian Altarpiece

This paper will consider two Christological cycles painted on leaves of vellum during the early fourteenth century. Both series of images are now in the British Library, one set (the Holkham Bible Picture Book) is well known and the other previously obscure; both have been thought to have been designed and painted by manuscript illuminators, because they occur in books. Yet the inclusion of illuminations within books does not necessarily mean that this is the context for which they were originally conceived. The core of the Hokham Bible may have started life as a series of designs for textiles which grew into a book. The second example consists of a series of 24 detached miniatures depicting the ministry and Passion of Christ which, although bound into a book in recent times, were in fact originally nailed to a wooden frame to form a vellum altarpiece – a rare phenomenon. The responses of both artists to the challenges of depicting the narrative of redemption for a wider audience will serve as portals int...