Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (review)

Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age is one of several titles recently issued by the British Library, published in North America by University of Toronto Press, that seek to provide large numbers of color reproductions of manuscript pages accompanied by a relatively small amount of text written by British Library staff who are experts in the particular subject area of each book. Other titles include Bible Manuscripts: 1400 Years of Scribes and Scripture by Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, Hebrew Manuscripts: The Power of Script and Image by Ilana Tahan, and Qur'an Manuscripts: Calligraphy, Illumination, Design by Colin F. Baker, all published in 2007. Michelle P. Brown served as a Curator of Western Manuscripts at the British Library from 1988 to 2006, when she assumed her current position as Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies in the School for Advanced Studies of the University of London. She is well known to Anglo-Saxonists both for the breadth and depth of her knowledge of pre-Conquest manuscripts and for her extraordinary courtesy to researchers during her years of service in the BL's Manuscripts Department. Her intimate familiarity with the manuscripts covered in this book is revealed both by the choice of pages for illustration and by the narrative she weaves around those pages.

Her primary aim is "to introduce readers to the history, culture and art of the Anglo-Saxons by means of their surviving manuscripts" (p. 7). Manuscripts facilitate the accomplishment of such a broadly defined end because—despite Viking depredations, the effects of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, and other local, regional, and national crises over the centuries—they survive in relatively large numbers from across the full geographical and temporal span of Anglo Saxon England; they "present a subtle and beautiful tapestry in which the warp and weft of cultural influences and agendas can be traced" (p. 7). Brown divides her survey into four chronologically-organized sections, each of which includes a few pages of introductory text followed by between twenty-nine and forty plates. Her first section, "The Insular World: Celts, Britons and Anglo-Saxons," covers the period up until the late eighth century, a time during which Anglo-Saxon scribes and artists shared a common culture with their Celtic counterparts to the point that the place or region of origin of several major manuscripts is still in dispute. Brown's recent work on the Lindisfarne Gospels, which has led her to date this icon of Insular manuscript production to the years ca. 715–20 rather than the more traditional ca. 698, and which she elaborated in a major book published in 2003, is here presented in a convenient summarized form. Two arresting suggestions made in this section are that Bede may have participated in the production of the three one-volume copies of the Bible made for Ceolfrith, early-seventh-century abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow (p. 15), and that it was perhaps Bede—who was commissioned by the Lindisfarne monastic community to rewrite the life of St. Cuthbert—who supplied Lindisfarne with the gospel book with Neapolitan connections that served as the textual model for the Lindisfarne Gospels (p. 16). In "Southumbria: The Rise of Mercia and Wessex," Brown notes that the establishment of Mercian political hegemony during the reigns of Æthelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96) led to the emergence of a Mercian Schriftprovinz whose common characteristics make it difficult to establish the exact place of origin of important manuscripts, including those of the influential Tiberius Group, named after an early-ninth-century copy of Bede's Ecclesiastical History now in the British Library. A genre that enjoyed unusual prominence during this period was the prayerbook intended for private devotion, of which four major examples survive in the Harley Prayerbook, the Royal Prayerbook, the Book of Nunnaminster, and the Book of Cerne. Brown shows that each of these is organized around a central devotional theme, the first three having perhaps been intended for female owners. Noting that...