Holy Writ

The Economist sings the praises of St. Cuthbert’s Gospel.

From the piece...

The gospel was commissioned to honour St Cuthbert, a monk, hermit and then reluctant bishop of the Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne, whose life and miracles were set down by the Venerable Bede, an early medieval chronicler. Bede lived and worked on the mainland at Wearmouth-Jarrow, the monastery where the book is believed to have been made by a man trained in the tradition of Egyptian Coptic bookbinding and decoration. Shortly after Bede’s hero, Cuthbert, died in 687, the book was placed in his coffin.

When the Vikings began raiding the north-east of England, the monks of Lindisfarne fled their island home with Cuthbert’s bones and wandered, like the Israelites in the desert, until they found sanctuary in Durham. In 1104 another chronicler, Simeon of Durham, records how Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in preparation for formal reinterment in a new church, the precursor of Durham cathedral. Cuthbert seemed not so much dead as sleeping, wrote Simeon. His limbs were flexible and his body “gave off a very pleasant odour”. By his head lay the book. Durham became a place of pilgrimage, and Cuthbert’s relics competed with those of the later Thomas à Becket in Canterbury.

Encased in its leather wrappings, Cuthbert’s gospel was protected from misadventure. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century it passed into the hands of collectors.