Manuscripts from the Anglo‐Saxon Age

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2009), "Manuscripts from the Anglo‐Saxon Age", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 4, pp. 319-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910952873

For many readers, Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer are the high points of Anglo‐Saxon or Old English literature. The survival of these works, typically Beowulf (which nearly got destroyed in 1731), is remarkable, the scholarship surrounding them has been substantial (cultural history, archaeology, calligraphy, how and why they were written), and their place in what is a much larger and wider body of written material is recognised only by experts. There were gospels and lectionaries, missals and breviaries, books of hours and biographies of saints, histories and charters and wills. Standing out are the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Harley Psalter, the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, the Tiberius Psalter, The Book of Kells, and the Stockholm Codex Aureus.

Michelle Brown reminds us (in one of four sections of critical commentary in the book) that, even though literacy was restricted long ago, many more people than imagined made up a community of reading, and that there were words to be seen and images to be read, “if with varying levels of comprehension and interpretation”, and everyone might be involved. As a British Library publication, this is an appropriate message for today, for the modern non‐expert, keen to know more about Anglo‐Saxon culture, often unable to see original works, printed and manuscript, and needing a concise and coherent interpretive guide. This book is intended to introduce readers to the history, culture and art of the Anglo‐Saxons by means of a survey of many of their surviving manuscripts: the variety of what is presented here are impressive, drawing on holdings of the British Library as well as many other famous collections (UK and abroad) and offering – for such a short book – an admirably comprehensive survey of the field.

There are 140 images, most in full‐colour, meticulously captioned and logically connected to the four sectional commentaries. These in their turn provide historical and cultural as well as book production and calligraphical background, assume some knowledge of the period but also go out of their way to explain for non‐experts. Typical of this approach is the discussion of the “insular” culture of the Anglo‐Saxons (after the Romans left Britain), the ways in which manuscripts were used as gifts as well as in didactic and functional ways, how different traditions (of image and script) developed and got carried through into new fusions (works like the Lindisfarne Gospels, for instance, influenced later texts), and Latin was translated in interlinear glosses and how historiated (or story‐telling) initials were incorporated (often later, sometimes earlier) in the text. Some Anglo‐Saxon manuscripts contain annotations and corrections by writers and/or owners (we find and see these in Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English, one of the Cotton MSS in the BL), while others, like the Aethelstan Psalter were refurbished with illuminations for the king of that name in the tenth century.

The historical coverage here is, realistically, from that insular world, where Northumbria was dominant in the seventh century, through the rise of Mercia and Wessex (Southumbria) in the eighth and ninth centuries, and then beyond to the time of Alfred and Aelfric and finally the age of Cnut up to the Conquest. Many of the MSS had a religious role to play – like the numerous gospel books, and consequently we see examples of these – incipit pages, miniatures of the saints, canon tables (rather like lists of contents), and, supremely, images of scenes from scripture. There are the Harrowing of Hell and the death of Goliath from the Tiberius Psalter, St Peter welcoming the souls of the blessed into heaven in the New Minster and Hyde Liber Vitae, and the representation of the illuminator himself, Eadui Basan, crouching at the feet of St Benedict in the Eadui Psalter. Other images are an early mappa mundi, evidence of Anglo‐Scandinavian styles in the Winchcombe Psalter, and unexpectedly realistic pathos in the figures of the mother of Jesus watching her son on the cross (the work of the Ramsey Psalter artist).

Some MSS were used for more than one purpose – one gospel‐book contains the earliest extant English manumission (by which Aethelstan freed slaves in 924). Artistic and literary activity was often driven by an urge to give books as a way of expiating sins, while, more wide, Anglo‐Saxon MSS were also created as part of a nationalism in England – to resist Viking expansion. A helpful bibliography identifies further historical and specialist sources, including those by Michelle Brown herself. She is a specialist in the history of medieval MSS, especially their scripts, and their cultural background. Librarians collecting in this area will find it helpful to know of at least two other BL publications – one a fascimile of the Holkham Bible (edited and translated by Brown, from the BL 2007) and another a fascimile of the Luttrell Psalter (with a commentary by Brown, from the BL, 2006). A visit to the BL website (for direct orders, the BL shop at www.bl.uk/shop) reveals other publications in this vein. Perfectionists will probably say that a mix in which at least some Latin and Old English texts were translated, or where more might be explained on how MSS like those of Cotton came to the BL, or how MSS were used in church liturgy, or how the artistic and textual traditions (typically the Carolingian) evolved would be desirable. But this would be criticise a book for not being what it never set out to be.

Brown wears her scholarship lightly in this concise and attractive study, making it suitable as a source‐book to support history at school and college and university levels as much as an informative introduction for the general reader and user of the public library. It has been said that the “dark ages” are only dark because we know all too little about them: the artwork here, say the Utrecht‐style illustrations in the Harley Psalter, or the memorable line‐work in the Psychomachia of Prudentius, or the haunting images in the Durham Gospels, confirm that this was an astonishingly creative period of cultural history. Like visiting a good exhibition, the book will inspire and impel serious research. It is a book, too, that will be useful to anyone lecturing in the subject in search of appropriate exemplars.