Origin and Meaning of Pattern in the Book of Kells

The Book Of Kells was composed either at Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, or at Kells in Co. Meath, Ireland, or begun at Iona and finished at Kells sometime in the eighth or ninth century. Like the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 721), which it resembles, the Book of Kells is an evangeliarium, a Gospel-book designed to honour Christ, and probably meant for liturgical use at St Mary's Abbey, Kells, where it remained up to the seventeenth century. At suitable places in the Gospel, sometimes forming part of the text, are the great colour picture pages—a portrait, a scene, a word or a letter. The texts of the Gospels were preceded by the standard preliminaries: glossaries, Table of Eusebian canons, the Breves Causae, and the Argumenta. The Gospels themselves, in the familiar order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, were written in Latin. But unlike the Lindisfarne manuscript of 258 pages, which were composed and illustrated by one person, the Book of Kells, approximately 100 pages longer and measuring 13 by 9 ¹/₂ inches, was worked on by at least four major illustrators and several minor ones. Nevertheless, it shares with the Lindisfarne manuscript the curvilinear pattern that is characteristic of Celtic art.

Turbulence and violence seem to provide the framework and context for the Book of Kells. The gorgeous manuscript, of which Giraldus Cambrensis recalled ‘nothing more marvellous than that wonderful book, written they say, at the dictation of an angel in the days of St Brigid’, is associated with the austere asceticism, the physical barrenness and the isolation of St Columba's missionary at Iona, from which the isle of Lindisfarne (off the coast of Northumbria), was colonised. Columba, one of whose religious houses was associated with a civil war and a bloody battle at Cooldrevny, near Sligo, was either condemned or self-exiled to Iona, which for centuries remained the centre of the order and from which ‘Columban’ Christianity quickly spread. St Mary's Abbey, Kell