Free B004R9Q09U EBOK by Alex Wright

literacy to the remote island culture resulted in a beautiful new art form with lasting cultural consequences: the illuminated manuscript.
    While the Irish were hardly the first tribal culture to come in contact with the literary arts, their experience differed in one important respect from previous historical encounters with literacy. Before the emergence of the bound book, literate cultures had always introduced the technology of writing to nonliterate people in a linear format: in stone, clay tablets, or papyrus scrolls. The Irish were the first people to learn to read from books. Ever since, Irish literacy has been inextricably bound (so to speak) with the form of the book.
    The sudden introduction of this new, random-access form of writing to a previously illiterate tribal society sparked a collision of cultures that would yield dazzling literary byproducts. In short order the Irish managed to embrace both writing and books, while imbuing them with their own unique cultural sensibilities. In the coming centuries, Ireland would become a kind of literary research and development laboratory, populated by talented scribes with a knack for innovation, working together in an environment largely insulated from the continental ravages of the Dark Ages. For the next 500 years the Irish scribes not only preserved the classical texts of the old Roman world, they also recorded their own indigenous Celtic mythologies and folklore, infusing bound books with their cultural heritage of storytelling and symbolism. Unencumbered by the institutionalized hierarchies of Rome and knowing nothing of government bureaucracies, religious institutions, or schools, the tribal people of Ireland took to literacy with zeal. Newly literate Irish monks began to navigate the great corpus of classical and scriptural knowledge. At first the early Irish manuscripts were artistically primitive affairs, scratched out on poor-quality vellum (made from cows’ stomachs) and stuffed with cramped and inconsistent handwriting. But the scribes learned quickly and soon showed a remarkable aptitude for the literary arts, mastering the finer points of majuscule and minuscule scripts, making notes in the marginalia, and decorating their texts with clever, sometimes provocative, illustrations. Within a centurythey were producing manuscripts of astonishing beauty. These new kinds of books would become the gold standard of European illuminated manuscripts. Within two centuries, Irish scribes were producing breathtaking specimens like the
Book of Kells
and later the
Lindisfarne Gospel
. The illuminated manuscript became Dark Age Ireland’s national art form.
    For the scribes, copying manuscripts was an act of private devotion and contemplation rather than a rote task. While the popular historical stereotype paints the monastic scribe as a dour clerical type, making laborious transcriptions—like the famous Xerox TV commercial caricature—the early Irish scribes were in truth anything but human copy machines:
     
    [The scribes] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual—glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him. 3
     
    The scribes found ample opportunities for exploration in making sense of these imported coded texts. Their capacity for inventiveness and experimentation stemmed in no small part from their near-total isolation from the Roman Church, which elsewhere on the continent was beginning to establish a governing structure with restrictive rules for its