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The history of manuscripts: Illuminating a dark age | The Economist
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Review our <a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/cookies-info" target="_blank">cookies information</a> for more details</div><div class="ec-messages messages-warning message-region-NA" id="ec-message-2"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/ec-messaging/2" class="dismiss-messages"></a>This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Review our <a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/cookies-info" target="_blank">cookies information</a> for more details</div> <div id="columns" class="clearfix"> <div id="column-content" class="grid-10 grid-first clearfix"> <!-- Create left column on search pages --> <article> <hgroup class="typog-content-header main-content-header"> <h2 class="fly-title">The history of manuscripts</h2> <h3 class="headline">Illuminating a dark age</h3> <h1 class="rubric">To grasp an important chapter in the story of writing, look to western, and then eastern, Christianity </h1> </hgroup> <aside class="floatleft light-grey"> <time class="date-created"> Dec 16th 2010 </time> | <span class="location">Dublin and mount sinai </span> |<a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/printedition/2010-12-18" class="source">From the print edition</a> </aside> <div id="block-ec_components-share_inline_header" class="block block-ec_components"> <div class="content clearfix"> <div class="share_inline_header"><ul class="clearfix"><li class="share-inline-header-facebook first" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_fb"><fb:like href="http://www.economist.com/node/17722535" ref="scn/fb_ec/illuminating_a_dark_age" send="false" layout="button_count" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></li> <li class="share-inline-header-twitter even last" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_twitter"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130129030609/http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-related="theeconomist" data-url="https://web.archive.org/web/20130129030609/http://econ.st/JwNwLi" data-counturl="http://www.economist.com/node/17722535">Tweet</a></li> </ul></div> </div> </div> <div class="main-content"> <div class="content-image-float clearfix" style="width: 290px;"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130129030609im_/http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2010/12/18/mx/20101218_mxp002.jpg" alt=" "/><span class="credit"></span></div> <p> A LONELY monastic scribe, toiling in some windswept eyrie on Europe's Atlantic fringe, bravely struggles to preserve the legacy of the Greco-Roman world from the encroaching barbarians. It is an image that modern Westerners—materially secure, but nervous about the longevity of their culture—find compelling.</p> <p> For its latest iteration, watch “The Secret of Kells”—a 75-minute animated film about early Ireland which has won acclaim in Europe and America. Gorgeous manuscripts with arcane symbols, wise old monastic teachers and marauders at the gate (Vikings, in this case) are enjoyably combined in this Franco-Belgo-Irish collaboration.</p> <p> Then recall the languid, patrician tones of Lord Clark, holding forth on the subject of civilisation: a fond memory for many a middle-aged art historian. At the start of his televised essay on the cultural history of the West, first shown in 1969, Clark asserted that weather-beaten calligraphers on remote Atlantic islands had preserved the classical heritage from the forces of darkness. “We got through by the skin of our teeth,” he declared. For a more nativist, Hibernian rendering, consult the slim bestseller penned by Thomas Cahill, an Irish-American writer in 1995: “How the Irish Saved Civilisation”.</p> <aside class="main-content-container"> <div class="secondary-header grey-header size-compact">In this section</div><ul class="expanded-list white-palette typog-list-exp related-items"><li class="0 first"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722567">The U-bend of life</a></li> <li class="1"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722557">The rich, the poor and Bulgaria</a></li> <li class="2"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722946">Time, gentlemen</a></li> <li class="3"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722650">Nasty, brutish and not that short</a></li> <li class="4"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722582">A new Grand Tour</a></li> <li class="5"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722676">The marvellous Magyar microcars</a></li> <li class="6"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722932">Fields of tears</a></li> <li class="7"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722664">Fire in the hole</a></li> <li class="8"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723124">Lights, camera, Africa</a></li> <li class="9"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723052">A village in a million</a></li> <li class="10"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723014">A righteous fist</a></li> <li class="11"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723207">Wine and tulips in Kabul</a></li> <li class="12"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723028">You choose</a></li> <li class="13"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722733">Rise of the image men</a></li> <li class="14"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722802">Suitably dressed</a></li> <li class="15"><span class="current-article ">Illuminating a dark age</span></li> <li class="16"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722547">Codices decoded</a></li> <li class="17"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17723223">The disposable academic</a></li> <li class="18 last"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/node/17722704">Another green world</a></li> </ul><div class="bottom-links"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/rights">Reprints</a></div><div class="secondary-header grey-header size-compact">Related topics</div><ul class="expanded-list white-palette typog-list-exp related-items"><li class="first"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/topics/christianity" class="related-inline-topics">Christianity</a></li> <li class="even"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/topics/egypt" class="related-inline-topics">Egypt</a></li> <li><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/topics/europe" class="related-inline-topics">Europe</a></li> <li class="even last"><a href="/web/20130129030609/http://www.economist.com/topics/ireland" class="related-inline-topics">Ireland</a></li> </ul> </aside> <p>Scraps of writing bring the Irish scribes alive as real, endearing human beings, in the form of notes scribbled in margins. One of the most famous is a monk's poem to Pangur his cat: “Hunting mice is his delight, hunting words I sit all night…” And the monks' terror of Viking raids is brought home by another evocative piece of doodling: “Bitter and wild is the wind tonight…[but] I feel at ease; fierce Northmen course quiet seas.”</p> <p>It's a great story, and the poetry is wonderful. Unfortunately, though, in one important way the historical facts do not accord with the romantic image of ragged scribes in a lonely struggle to preserve Christian culture from the forces of darkness. They were by no means alone in their efforts: in warmer places other holy men were similarly illuminating the world, and there may have been quite a bit of contact between them all, including visits.</p> <p>To understand what was happening in the early Christian history of the British Isles, it is necessary to look at the religious libraries of the Christian East. The greatest of these is located on the slopes of Mount Sinai, at the monastery of Saint Catherine, whose foundation in the mid-sixth century roughly coincides with the spread of Christianity, and hence Latin writing, from Ireland to Scotland—whence it later shifted to the north of England.</p> <p> Compared with the handful of texts that survive from newly Christian Ireland, the Sinai collection is vast and diverse. Along with over 6,000 early printed books, there are 3,300 manuscripts in a dozen languages, mainly Greek, Georgian, Slavonic and three Semitic tongues—Arabic, Syriac and Aramaic. The quality varies too: there are superbly illuminated volumes with gilded letters, from royal workshops in Constantinople (pictured), and much humbler texts, bound with crude boards and stained from centuries of use. And on Sinai, just as in Ireland, flashes of humanity appear on the margins of old texts. “God knows what sort of original I had to work with,” moans an irascible Georgian transcriber at the end of one codex.</p> <p> The content of the library, including the “new finds” discovered in a ruined tower in 1975, is more or less known; scholars in several countries have been working to integrate the publicly available catalogues and publish the resulting list on the web. A well-connected charitable foundation, with branches in London, New York and Geneva, has assessed the library's condition and drawn up a plan for its long-term conservation.</p> <p> But if the St Catherine's collection still holds surprises, and possible clues as to the origins of monastic writing at the other end of the Christian world, they are probably lurking underneath familiar texts. In other words, they are the lower layers of palimpsests—pieces of parchment which scribes reused at least once after attempting (not quite successfully, thank goodness) to wash off the original.</p> <p> The ever-growing ability to decipher palimpsests is perhaps the most exciting way in which modern technology is throwing light on the role of the written word during the dark ages. One of the most spectacular feats in this field concerns the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest. American scientists, using technology designed to monitor objects in space, looked underneath a Byzantine liturgical manuscript and found a hitherto unknown text from one of the fathers of mathematics and engineering. In addition to the work by Archimedes, there was material from an orator which throws fresh light on ancient Athenian politics.</p> <p> If all goes to plan, the same technology may soon be applied to the multi-layered writings at St Catherine's; there are at least 120 of them, and most have yet to be examined properly. Under an agreement between the monastery and the California-based Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, researchers hope to spend five years peeping beneath the palimpsests. Michael Phelps, the director of that project, says he is excited about certain texts which have, say, Georgian or a Semitic language on top and who knows what hiding underneath. Already, a manuscript with Georgian on the surface turned out to have a bottom layer in a rare language called Caucasian-Albanian: it was spoken by a nearly extinct Christian people that once flourished in present-day Azerbaijan but is now confined to a few villages.</p> <p> And there is an excellent chance of some new information about those monastic heroes from the Celtic fringe. Even now, there are some intriguing hints. One has been spotted by Michelle Brown, a paleographer and art historian who has spent much of her life studying and describing the north European manuscripts at the British Library. She has already done some research at St Catherine's in the hope of uncovering contacts between Sinai and the Latin West, including the British Isles. When she was shown one of the monastery's Christian Arab texts, she noticed Latin writing underneath; it was clearly in the “insular” style first developed in Ireland and then exported to Northumbria via Scotland. Mrs Brown, a professor of medieval manuscript studies at the University of London, believes that scribes from the British Isles may have worked on the slopes of Mount Sinai, writing in Latin.</p> <p> If high-tech investigations bear that out, it could transform the way we imagine the early history of the Christian world. The fact that Christendom eventually split, in 1054, into a Latin West and a Greek East does not mean that things were always so divided. Despite their harsh and isolated surroundings, the ascetics of Mount Sinai may have had a wide range of contacts, ranging from the Celtic fringe to present-day Iraq and beyond. They were a nodal point, perhaps, in a thoroughly globalised Christian world, embracing the Roman empire and much more. And the Irish monks were not as isolated as people have hitherto imagined either.</p> <p> As Mrs Brown points out, there is a short but intriguing list of facts that link the ascetics of Egypt and the western fringe of Europe. For example, an early Irish litany makes an enigmatic reference to the “seven monks of Egypt”. The Irish word for a retreat or refuge—the sort of place which sent Lord Clark into such raptures—is <em>diseart</em>, clearly derived from the Latin<em> desertus</em> which initially meant an abandoned, solitary place. </p> <p> An Irish-born monastic, writing in the late seventh century, shows a remarkable knowledge of the Middle East, including the Nile and Alexandria. Abbot Adomnan also describes a church on the river Jordan, marking the site of Christ's baptism, so precisely that Jordanian archaeologists are still making use of his account. The abbot presents all this knowledge as information gleaned from a wandering pilgrim who washed up on the shores of the Scottish island of Iona; but Adomnan clearly knew a great deal before the bedraggled visitor appeared. </p> <p> And in September the National Museum of Ireland added to the list of clues with an exciting announcement: traces of Egyptian papyrus had been detected in the binding of a 1,200-year-old psalter, discovered in the bogs of Tipperary in 2006 by a surprised turf-cutter. These are scraps of evidence, not certainties; but they lend weight to the idea that Celtic scribes labouring in their rain-swept refuges were not so much saving Roman civilisation as participating in a spiritual movement inspired by the desert hermits of Egypt: a movement that was conceived, in part, as a revolt <em>against</em> civilisation. Or at any rate, against what some saw as the jaded decadence of urban life in the twilight of empire.</p> <p>Here is an insight from the Egyptian end. For John of the Ladder, one of the first abbots of the Sinai monastery, writing was an ascetic exercise as much as a utilitarian one: “Before sleep, he prayed much and wrote books; this served as his sole means of subduing despondency.” Some nuggets of civilisation may have been saved in the process, but that was not the object of the exercise. Saint Patrick's memoirs, penned a century earlier, do not tell us how he felt about the process of writing but the spirit of self-discipline is similar; and his mission to Ireland was preceded by monastic training in what is now France, possibly on the Lérins islands (off the Riviera) where the Egyptian tradition was followed. </p> <p> And in East and West alike, scholars can trace how the role of the written word shifted over time. Books became holy objects or talismans. Irish tribes carried them into battle; a Greek Christian writer called a completed Gospel a “presence” which somehow sanctified its environs without being opened. Yet books had practical as well as ritual purposes: they were intended to be read aloud in church or at monastic dinner-tables. And when practical needs changed, old writing was (nearly) erased.</p> <p> Silent reading also developed, at both ends of Christendom. Ambrose of Milan, a Latin writer who was well known in Ireland, impressed Augustine of Hippo with his quiet perusal of a text. And to another early Christian writer, Isaac of Syria, the noiseless contemplation of the written word was balm to the soul. “I practise silence, that the verses of my readings and prayers should fill me with delight. Then, when…the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent to me by inner thoughts…suddenly arising to delight my heart.”</p> <p> As Mrs Brown has noted, people at this time came to realise that “the very absence of the human voice could render…communication all the richer” by giving the reader extra time and space to absorb the text and its many layers of meaning. A similar passion for the written word—the process, the product and the effect on the reader—can be detected in Western scribes like Columba of Iona and Bede of Northumbria. Whatever those monastic calligraphers were doing, they were not merely keeping texts safe from the barbarians, in the hope that many centuries later, posh British art-historians or clever cartoonists would commend them. 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