Friday, March 6, 2020

Exploring the Book of Kells

 At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the key books about the Book of Kells was the study by Sir Edward Sullivan (1920) which contained page prints of excellent quality for the time along with Sullivan's exuberant commentary.  This book is now in the public domain and is available to browse through or download at the Internet Archives:

 


Many people have contemplated the illuminations of the Book of Kells through Sullivan's book and found inspiration there.  James Joyce carried Sullivan's book all over Europe with him:



FutureLearn and Trinity College, Dublin provides an excellent page on 


 
Nowadays you can look at every page of the Book of Kells online and zoom in on all the details.  This amazing digital version is provided by the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin:


In studying the Book of Kells it is customary, as with most manuscripts, to refer to each physical page as a leaf or folio, and to distinguish the recto (or front) and the verso (or back) of the sheet.  So in looking at the online Book of Kells you have a number for each folio or physical page followed by an r or a v for recto or verso.

In our previous Kells post The Beautiful and Mysterious Book of Kells, we looked at the 67th page, called the Chi Rho Page.   For the online version, we would find this page called Folio 34r, meaning the recto or front of the 34th sheet:



We can zoom in on the cats and mice and save a fine quality image:



  If we zoom in on the Celtic interweave pattern near the top right of the page, we see that it has the head of a bird:



So Trinity College, Dublin has generously provided us with a fine tool for exploring the Book of Kells and making our own collection of images for personal viewing, both full page and zoomed in to intricate detail.

Here is an link to the set of books I found particularly helpful in my own exploration of the Book of Kells:

Ten Great Books about the Book of Kells

   

And here is a link to the...


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