Book I

Focusing on how we perceive images and their relationship to cognition, perception, and representation, this chapter examines the relationship of Joyce’s long fascination with the history of inscription and alphabet, letters and sigla, primitive art, Giordano Bruno, The Book of Kells, and the image-making powers of the mind.

The Book of Kells - The Wonders of Early Medieval Christian Manuscript Illuminations Within a Pagan World

For a long time now, we have been misled by the general notion that the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century brought about a devastating decline of culture and civilization. The Germanic peoples were allegedly barbaric, and what they created upon the ruins of their predecessors could have been nothing but primitive and little sophisticated. Research has, of course, confirmed already in a variety of approaches and many specialized studies that the situation on the ground was very different,1 but it seems rather difficult to deconstruct this mythical notion even today, as much as it needs to be corrected and extensively qualified. Recently, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti have published a volume treating an intriguing selection of fifty objects that could represent the early Middle Ages, each one of them proving by itself that the arts and technology to produce those objects continued to be extraordinarily sophisticated and impressive, and this well beyond the Roman period and well before the rise of the Gothic era.2 Those objects include ceremonial regalia, mosaic pavements, medallions, coins, stirrups, buildings, fibula, tunics, oil lamps, ships, and castles. The quality and aesthetic appeal of all of them is stunning, but they make up, of course, only a selection and do not reveal the more common conditions of the ordinary people.

Bernard Meehan. The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin, fully revised and updated edition.

This is a beautiful book. It is fantastic for students and novices just learning about manuscripts, those learning codicological description, and anyone who wants an overview of the Book of Kells. The volume contains just a short taste of one of the most famous medieval manuscripts, and any of the sections could easily have been expanded further; indeed, I am rather impressed with how much information each section includes while still remaining concise. The information is also accessible to a wide variety of interests and knowledge levels and, in my honest opinion, is worth the price for the illustrations alone.