Amidst the many treasures on show in the British Library's 2018-19 exhibition "Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms," the star item, highlighted in almost all the press coverage, was Codex Amiatinus. This mighty one-volume Bible, made at Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, had returned to England for the first time since 716. Now as then, its sheet scale (1029 folios in a book-block that is 260 mm thick, weighing 34 kilos / 75.5 lbs) makes it an object of wonder. It also makes it challenging to study: apart from the difficulty of gaining access to it in the first place, and beyond the practical problems of manipulating a volume that is so bulky that it cannot be consulted on a conventional desk in a reading room, the sheer quantity of material that it represents in terms of codicology, text, script, articulation, and corrections is formidable to master. The signal achievement of Celia Chazelle's monograph, the fruit of many years' labour, thought and preliminary publications, is to present the first comprehensive analysis of this marvel of the early medieval world, assessing the manuscript in relation to its contexts at Wearmouth-Jarrow, within Anglo-Saxon England, and as part of Christendom.
The result is necessarily long (more than 600 pages--just over a quarter of the number in Codex Amiatinus itself). However, understanding this complicated artefact, its production, rationale, early history, and possible significance presupposes knowing as much as possible about its contexts. Thus, after setting the scene and outlining the issues to be tackled (Ch. 1, part 1), Chazelle examines the nature of the Wearmouth-Jarrow community and its place within the kingdom of Northumbria (Ch. 1, part 2), considers how the Bible was woven into its devotional life and ideology (Ch. 4, part 1), and scrutinises how scripture was understood and expounded by its great scholar, Bede (Ch. 2). The documentary evidence for Bible production at Wearmouth-Jarrow and the nature of Codex Amiatinus itself can thus be considered in relation to the fine grain of their environment: political, liturgical, devotional, intellectual, and ideological (Ch. 3 and Ch. 4, part 2). The potential meanings of the first quire of the manuscript (which includes an image of Ezra, a representation of the Tabernacle, diagrams for the ordering of scripture, along with dedicatory verses) can be explored in better informed, more probing ways (Ch. 5), and the volume's range of roles as a gift to St Peter can be elucidated (Ch. 6). The final chapter (7) presents a summary of key findings and suggestions. A description of the volume is provided in an appendix. There is a thorough index.
Close attention to the chronology and detail of Bede's scriptural commentaries and their concordance (or otherwise) with the minutiae of readings and graphic emphases within Amiatinus's text permits Chazelle to argue that the manuscript was not, as has long been the scholarly orthodoxy, the third of the three pandects made under Abbot Ceolfrith but rather the first, perhaps dating from c. 700, and that fifteen years later it was re-purposed, via the addition of what is now the first quire, for the role of an offering to St Peter. This (as are all Chazelle's suggestions) is advanced with appropriate caution, acknowledging the limitations as well as the strengths of the relevant evidence.
The most telling point in favour of the priority of Codex Amiatinus is the circumstance that it marks a more definite division between III and IV Kings than is seen on themembra disjecta from one of the other Ceolfrith Bibles (this is the only incipit preserved among the thirteen damaged folios in question), whose "relatively more restrained layout of the division...conforms better to Bede's interpretation, by the early 710s when he finished his Expositio on Acts, of Kings as a continuous, single liber with four parts" (p. 217). The most important counter-consideration (duly acknowledged) is that the palaeography of Amiatinus, embracing features such as the degree of word division as well as the appearance of the script itself, is most logically interpreted as posterior not anterior to that of the surviving leaves from the other Ceolfrith Bible. (The alternative explanation here offered for this phenomenon is that the Sister Bibles may have been written with less care than Amiatinus: pp. 292, 458.) A further inconvenience, not really addressed (but then the most detailed study of the features was published simultaneously with Chazelle's book) is that it was precisely in relation to the rubrics at book divisions--what they contained, how long they were, even whether they were included at all--that the individual scribes of Amiatinus had most autonomy: rubrics were determined by a combination of what was present in the relevant exemplars (all lost), where the book division happened to fall on the page, and by the preferences of the individual scribes rather than by any overarching plans for the volume as a whole. There is also the broader question of how likely it would be for Abbot Ceolfrith, at the end of his life, designating a volume for the supremely important role of being offered to St Peter as an expression of the relationship between his community and Rome and as a public declaration of his commitment to the Bible, to choose the copy that did not (according to Chazelle's arguments) reflect their current thinking about the most accurate form of Scripture.
A more general problem attends any interpretation of the small differences between the sister leaves and Amiatinus itself, as Chazelle acknowledges: since it is clear that the individual scribes responsible for Codex Amiatinus varied among themselves in transcriptional practices and since all that remains of the Sister Bibles is thirteen imperfect leaves from one of them, it is impossible to know how far what appears in this tiny fragment was representative of that volume as a whole (let alone of the other copy that is completely lost). In sum, Chazelle's case is strong but not conclusive.
There are numerous other thought-provoking suggestions, some inevitably more compelling than others, but all worthy of the reader's attention--for instance, that Wearmouth-Jarrow might in fact have made more than three Bibles (unlikely, if not impossible, not least given the increasing scribal time that was devoted after 702/3 to copying Bede's prodigious output); that Codex Amiatinus may once have been bound in two or more volumes (not easy to reconcile with its own codicology); that the Sister Bibles may have been left unbound in anticipation of textual reworking. And considerable space (pp. 311-449) is devoted to teasing out "the layers of signification the Wearmouth-Jarrow monks likely associated" with the material in the preliminary quire plus the full-page maiestas image that prefaces the New Testament, putative meanings which, moreover, they "hoped its Roman audience would appreciate" (pp. 415, 428 etc.). The analysis of these resonant pages--already the subject of a disproportionate amount of previous modern commentary on Codex Amiatinus--is erudite and engaging. However, given the multiple hypotheticals that are sometimes involved--what Ezra (for instance)may have meant at Wearmouth-Jarrow and how the community might have hoped the image would have been understood in Rome--the interpretations, though rich and plausible, are ultimately unprovable.
A demerit of the book that was presumably beyond the author's control is its physical form: the choice of a standard mid-range page size (240x160 mm) for such a long text means that it is very fat; being "perfect bound," it does not open properly and, as it was produced with inadequate margins, the ends of lines on the versos and the beginnings of those on rectos are always curving away into a deep gutter. Furthermore, the chosen size means that the illustrations from Codex Amiatinus (all of full pages) are reduced from their monumental 505x340 mm to a mere 160x110 mm, rendering every palaeographical feature effectively invisible. As not a single actual-size detail is provided, it is impossible for any reader to grasp what the stately script that is the glory of the manuscript really looks like, let alone to distinguish one scribal hand from another. Further to bedevil palaeographers, the Saint Cuthbert Gospel, a diminutive Wearmouth-Jarrow copy of John whose pages measure a mere 132x86 mm and so could easily have been accommodated actual size, has paradoxically been enlarged to 170x110 mm. Had a format appropriate to an art history book been adopted (such as the 320x250 mm of Bernard Meehan's The Book of Kells), the images of full manuscript pages could have been reproduced at half actual size, and a series of actual-size details could have been included for each scribe. Such would have added enormously to the value of the book as a research resource. Other publishers could doubtless have done this for no more than the $140 that Brill is charging for the present volume.
Nonetheless, Celia Chazelle is to be warmly congratulated for offering what can justly be described as the first comprehensive account of this monument of early medieval book production, putting knowledge about Codex Amiatinus, Wearmouth-Jarrow and its biblical culture on a new footing. Potential users--and there ought to be many--should be aware that, notwithstanding the many helpful subdivisions into which the text is organised, this is not a work that can easily be skimmed or sampled. On the contrary, a proper understanding of any individual point presupposes reading the book in its entirety--and with due attention to the author's scrupulous honesty about the relative strength of the various arguments that are advanced.