http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/07/early-booksTHE book fits into the palm of your hand. Barely three inches across, it weighs no more than a few ounces and opens with words familiar through the ages: In principio erat verbum (“In the beginning was the word”). It was written more than 1,300 years ago in a neat hand using ink made of oak-gall nuts mixed with carbon. On July 14th news came that St Cuthbert’s Gospel, the earliest intact European book—looking exactly as it did when it was made at the end of the seventh century—will be bought for Britain for £9m ($14.3m) from the Jesuit order. It will be on display half the time at the British Library in London, and half the time in the north-east of England.
What is remarkable is not the price; though a record for a religious book, it is still considered a bargain (the Rothschild "Book of Hours", an illuminated work dating from 1505, fetched £8.6m at auction in 1999). Nor is it a shock that the funds have all come from philanthropic sources, given Britain's newly whetted appetite for private giving (see chart below). The real story is the object itself. The gospel was commissioned to honour St Cuthbert, a monk, hermit and then reluctant bishop of the Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne, whose life and miracles were set down by the Venerable Bede, an early medieval chronicler. Bede lived and worked on the mainland at Wearmouth-Jarrow, the monastery where the book is believed to have been made by a man trained in the tradition of Egyptian Coptic bookbinding and decoration. Shortly after Bede’s hero, Cuthbert, died in 687, the book was placed in his coffin.
When the Vikings began raiding the north-east of England, the monks of Lindisfarne fled their island home with Cuthbert’s bones and wandered, like the Israelites in the desert, until they found sanctuary in Durham. In 1104 another chronicler, Simeon of Durham, records how Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in preparation for formal reinterment in a new church, the precursor of Durham cathedral. Cuthbert seemed not so much dead as sleeping, wrote Simeon. His limbs were flexible and his body “gave off a very pleasant odour”. By his head lay the book. Durham became a place of pilgrimage, and Cuthbert’s relics competed with those of the later Thomas à Becket in Canterbury.
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