TY - THES
AU - Bonita Mae Cox
AB - The two particulars that make the Lindisfarne Gospels a touchstone for the study of the Anglo-Saxon Period--its art and its Old English gloss--have generated a great deal of scholarly inquiry and discussion. The whys of those particulars--why its artist/scribe adopted the synthetic style for its illuminations in the late seventh century, and why its Latin text was glossed in English in the mid-tenth century--however, have not. This dissertation asks and suggests answers to those questions.

The Lindisfarne Gospels was from its conception intended by the Lindisfarne monks to serve as an ideologically powerful instrument in the promotion of their patron saint to a larger than local constituency. This study investigates and seeks to recover the book's function as an object of veneration within two phases of that activity: the role its art played in the making of St. Cuthbert as the saint of Northumbrian synthesis in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, and the role its English gloss played in the re-making of St. Cuthbert as the saint of English unification in the tenth century. Those roles are examined within the context of a wide range of historical, social, artistic, literary, and paleographic data from both primary sources (in Latin and Old English) and secondary scholarship.

The evidence argues that the Lindisfarne Gospels was more than an artistic event in the late seventh century and more than a literary event in the mid-tenth. As both a product and a producer of the attitudes and thinking of those who conceived it, contributed to it, and venerated it as St. Cuthbert's book and relic, the Lindisfarne Gospels was in both periods also a political event.
LA - English
M3 - Ph.D. Dissertation
N2 - The two particulars that make the Lindisfarne Gospels a touchstone for the study of the Anglo-Saxon Period--its art and its Old English gloss--have generated a great deal of scholarly inquiry and discussion. The whys of those particulars--why its artist/scribe adopted the synthetic style for its illuminations in the late seventh century, and why its Latin text was glossed in English in the mid-tenth century--however, have not. This dissertation asks and suggests answers to those questions.

The Lindisfarne Gospels was from its conception intended by the Lindisfarne monks to serve as an ideologically powerful instrument in the promotion of their patron saint to a larger than local constituency. This study investigates and seeks to recover the book's function as an object of veneration within two phases of that activity: the role its art played in the making of St. Cuthbert as the saint of Northumbrian synthesis in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, and the role its English gloss played in the re-making of St. Cuthbert as the saint of English unification in the tenth century. Those roles are examined within the context of a wide range of historical, social, artistic, literary, and paleographic data from both primary sources (in Latin and Old English) and secondary scholarship.

The evidence argues that the Lindisfarne Gospels was more than an artistic event in the late seventh century and more than a literary event in the mid-tenth. As both a product and a producer of the attitudes and thinking of those who conceived it, contributed to it, and venerated it as St. Cuthbert's book and relic, the Lindisfarne Gospels was in both periods also a political event.
PB - Stanford University
PY - 1995
EP - 211 pp.
TI - The Book as Relic: The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Politics of Sainthood
ER -