Palæography / Notes upon the History of Writing and the Medieval Art of Illumination

by Bernard Quaritch

Bede, in spite of his Romanist tendency, and his Romanist aversion to the practice of the Celtic church with regard to the Paschal festival and the tonsure, gives clear evidence that in the middle of the seventh century "many Englishmen of the noble and the meaner sort" resorted to Ireland, and dwelt there for the purpose either of study or of leading a religious life (divinæ lectionis vel continentioris vitæ gratiâ), and states that "the Scots received them all most willingly, giving them their daily food without charge, also books for reading, and gratuitous instruction." The Angles were apt pupils. They learned to write and ornament books of their own in the Irish manner, and they had Irish monks in their new monasteries who fostered the art. By the close of the seventh century, there were expert penmen among the Anglian monks, and during the eighth century, although the very close adherence to Irish models is the feature of most of the ornamental manuscripts, they began to strike out a new and characteristic line of their own in which they soon surpassed their masters. This was in figure-drawing, in miniatures painted with a mastery of design which was altogether unknown to the Irish. The heads or figures which appeared in Irish illuminations were merely accessory and subordinate to the scheme of decoration, utterly contemptible as delineations of human form. In the Anglo-Saxon miniatures of the period which began—say about 750 and continued to the eleventh century, there is a distinct national school, in which the over-anxious treatment of draperies and the striking addiction to light green pigment, are prominent characteristics. The style gives a sort of general impression that it had been formed upon a Byzantine model, but the probability is that the later classical survival in Italy in the seventh century had helped to form the Anglo-Saxon taste as well as the taste of the Carolingian school. A similar, but ruder, expression of the same Anglo-Saxon method of illustration appeared in German work of the tenth and eleventh centuries; and as this had its parentage in the French Carolingian art of the ninth century, we may suspect that the tendency which brought that art to its perfection in the time of Charles the Bald, had begun in Gaul before the time of Charles the Great, that is, earlier than the usual date of its sudden genesis. This conjecture would make the production of books illustrated with miniatures synchronise in France and England, and thus obviate the difficulty of supposing that the Anglo-Saxons invented the art and carried it to perfection within a century of their learning how to write. It is sufficient glory for them to have converted the artistic movement of the time into a national school of painting unmistakable with any other, at a time when the calligraphical schools of central and Southern France, under an enlightened Frankish emperor, and with far superior opportunities, were labouring for a Gallo-Roman renaissance.

Origin of Mediæval Illumination

Books in the classical period had of course been ornamented with illustrations, but the illumination of books (in the mediæval sense) did not originate with the Græco-Roman calligraphers of the Empire. We cannot suppose that it sprang into life in Ireland, but certainly its first European manifestation was in Irish MSS., and the art had not been received by the Irish from any of the European nations. The only alternative is, however, far fetched, that Christian missionaries from the East (or with Eastern training) had preceded St. Patrick and brought with them those characteristics of Syro-Egyptian art which are traceable alike in Irish and in Byzantine work. The documentary period of writing in Ireland is of course later than the actual practice of the art in that country, but it is earlier than amongst any other of the unromanised barbarians. Adamnan, writing about A.D. 670, relates the life of St. Columba (dead in 598) and describes the writing materials which that saint had used in his scriptorium in the island of Hy. As he had learned to write in Ireland and had begun his priestly career there before 540, we may place the historically ascertainable use of writing in Ireland as beginning with the early years of the sixth century. Irish monks carried the art to Britain, to Gaul, to Germany; and those elaborate and intricate patterns to which the French give the names of "lettres perlées, lettres brodées, spirales, nœuds, et entrelacs, initiales ophiomorphiques, ichthyomorphiques," &c., and which they claim as indigenous productions of Carolingian France in the early part of the ninth century—were fruits of the teaching of Irish missionaries, in the houses which they founded in Britain and all over the continent in the seventh century.

Some of the remarks in the preceding section will be found in strong disagreement with the authority of Professor Westwood, whose work on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish miniatures is such a splendid testimony to his zeal and ability. His conjectural dates are, however, frequently misleading. An instance is that of the so-called Bible of St. Gregory, figured on his [plates 14], [15]. In the text he says that Sir Frederick Madden had declared the MS. to be "unquestionably of the eighth century," but he prefers to call it of the seventh, in agreement with Casley and Astle (who thought so in the last century!). He ought to have accepted the opinion of a recognised master in palæography like Sir Frederick, so far as the writing is concerned, in preference to that of two men living at a time before the science had attained anything like exactness in England. He ought also to have seen or felt, while making his elaborate facsimile, that the nearest parallel to the style of illumination of his "first page of Luke" is to be found in Carolingian work executed about 800; and that no great space of time could separate the two examples. The English work was probably the earlier, but it can hardly have been accomplished before 770. The purely Irish patterns in the columns supporting the arch, with the excellent picture of St. Luke that surmounts it, prove by their combination that the work is Anglo-Saxon of its second and finer period, that is after the phase in which it was merely and wholly imitative of the Irish. With these considerations in view, and a remembrance of Bede's words quoted above in relation to Anglian education in Ireland about A.D. 650, the assignment of the Bible of St. Gregory to the seventh century is a pure absurdity.—Again, Westwood's facsimile from the Golden Gospels of Stockholm, bears the attribution "Sixth Century? Ninth Century?" while its position in the book, as the first plate, tends to show that Professor Westwood leaned to the earlier date. Yet the book is unquestionably not Irish; its artistic illustration is a singularly fine development of Anglo-Saxon art—think of Anglo-Saxon art and chrysography in the sixth century! The writing cannot be mistaken for Roman uncials of the sixth century; it is plainly in Carolingian uncials of the latter half of the eighth. The book seems to have been illustrated by an Anglian hand, and written by a Frankish one,—probably on the continent rather than in England.

Books in Irish or Saxon-Irish writing are found all over the continent. As they were written in monasteries founded by Irish missionaries during the seventh and eighth centuries, they only indicate that a succession of Irish or of Saxon monks continued to make their way for a considerable period to France, Germany, and Italy. The writing can hardly be said to have left any traces in the various national hands of those countries, but the Irish house at Bobbio probably transmitted the use of the interlaced ornamentation which revived in Italy several centuries later.

Most of the motifs of decoration in the illuminated Carolingian, Visigothic, and Lombardic MS. were derived from the Irish methods of ornamentation introduced through monastic houses and schools established by Irish monks on the continent. French writers deny their indebtedness to foreigners for it, since, as they say, the pattern was always at hand in the tessellated and mosaic pavements of Gallo-Roman architecture. But there is something of unnecessary vanity in the denial. The Irish MSS. of the seventh century are the first in Europe which contain decorative initials of the kind. This fact is indisputable, and is not affected by the question of original derivation, which in my opinion is to be sought for in the east among those Hellenised Syrians and Egyptians who were the propagators of Christian art as well as Christian religion in the west.

Merowingian, Lombardic, Visigothic

These names, applied to varying styles of writing, are without historical exactness. Roughly speaking, the first means the debased Roman used in Gaul and Western Germany from the sixth to the eighth century, the second was the script of the larger part of Italy (but chiefly the east and the south) between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, the third was the national hand of Spain and Languedoc during the eighth to the twelfth century. The names are based upon erroneous historical assumptions. The Frankish kings, supposed to be descended from Merowig, carried with them across the Rhine no graphic system whatever. They found in Gaul the identical styles of writing which were used in Italy, and such of their people as gave up the trade of warriors to assume that of clerics and councillors, were obliged to learn the arts of the Gauls. The circumstances under which the new kingdom was established as a permanent institution, were not such as to make the Franks a nation of penmen; and the influence of their bad taste in calligraphy could hardly have been felt till the beginning of the seventh century. Their Gallic underlings continued to write as before, but in the absence of enlightened patronage, the schools of art no longer produced good work, except in the monasteries of the Provincia Romana, where less deterioration took place than elsewhere. The Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the Rhine from south to north, even in "Merovingian" times, that the use of the word to designate a special style of writing is hardly desirable. It is probable enough that in the seventh century and the early part of the eighth a kind of uniformity existed in the writing used in all the region between Paris and Mentz, but it was nothing else than Roman uncials, semiuncials, and minuscules written in more or less cramped and graceless fashion; varying only in the degree of badness according to the locality. It is Roman cacography with a Germanic stamp upon it. There was a decided improvement in it when the eighth century was in progress.

The Lombardic hand is also a Roman hand as written by or for barbarians who lived nearer to the centre of civilisation than the Franks did. To justify its name it would be necessary to show that it originated and was practised in the region we call Lombardy in the seventh century. There is, however, no trace of its existence before the ninth century, and very little show of its having been used to any extent in Cisalpine Gaul. Most of the surviving examples of its employment as a national or local script indicate Eastern and Southern Italy as its home during the ninth to the twelfth century; while most of the manuscripts produced in Lombardy and northern Italy during that time belong rather to the Carolingian type. In fact, the Carolingian minuscule, the Visigothic minuscule, and the Lombardic minuscule all show at their beginning so much similarity that we look for examples of the latter two sufficiently early to decide a doubt which arises—which of the three was the fountain head of modern letters. The chief marks of distinction in the Lombardic through its whole career are the t shaped nearly like a, and the a shaped like cc. The Visigothic t is identical with the Lombardic; and in the a there is so little unlikeness that the form of the letter seems to be something halfway between u and cc. (It is equivalent to cc without their beaks or initial knobs.) The circumstance that two scripts so widely removed in place should retain common peculiarities, down to the very end of their severed existence, leads to a suspicion that the so-called Lombardic was probably a post-Ulfilan Ostrogothic. The peculiarities referred to, and some others which need not be specialised, are also found in the "Merowing" writing of books produced west of the Rhine in the seventh century. Now as Carolingian writing is quite free from these peculiarities, we can safely conclude that the Lombardic and the Visigothic are both older than the time of Charles the Great. It is usually supposed by those who see the difficulty attaching to the use of the name Lombardic, that the mode of writing so styled was used in the kingdom of the Longbeards, but died out in its chief home after the conquest by the Franks, and only maintained a continued existence in the Neapolitan duchies held by princes of Lombardic origin. The suspicion hinted at above becomes stronger when we review these facts. The Lombards were a far rougher and more uncultivated race than the Goths, and found a Gothic-Roman script in use in Italy when they entered to destroy the kingdom of Theodoric. It was probably in Ravenna that the so-called Lombardic minuscule had its seat during the sixth century, side by side with the declining Gothic uncial of Wulfila. From Ravenna, its spread over the east and south of Italy would be much more easily effected than from Milan or Pavia; and its undeniable similarity to the Visigothic script of Spain leads to the belief that these two were the real Gothic writing of the early Middle Ages, as distinguished from the Mœsian alphabet, which cannot have endured much longer than the reign of Theodoric himself. The hand which is called broken Lombard belongs to a later time. Its characteristic is an attempt to produce an ornamental wavy effect by suspending the weight of the pen-stroke in the middle of each descent, but the forms of the letters remain unchanged. It was a fashion of Neapolitan writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and seems to correspond in its own school with that tendency in the schools of northern countries which produced the angular "gothic" of the thirteenth. As has been remarked in another paragraph, the "Lombardic" flourished even in Italy, side by side with the pure Carolingian, which had become the most favoured of all handwritings since the Empire of the West was renewed in the family of Charles the Great. The Carolingian, however, seems to have encroached to no more southerly point than Rome itself, leaving all the region beyond to its Lombardic rival.

Of the Visigothic, as of the Lombardic, it has to be said that, so far as extant specimens are concerned, it might well have been the offspring of the Carolingian, rather than an elder form of writing. Its kinship, however, to "Merowingian" and "Lombardic" is undeniable, and there is a very fair show of probability that the Visigoths had something to do with it, notwithstanding the fact that we only know it in examples later than the destruction of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. What the term Visigothic means we do not know. Most people think it meant West Gothic, and that is how it was interpreted by Jornandes, who, as an Italian Ostrogoth of the sixth century, ought to have been capable of understanding the sense of the word. It is, however, very uncertain; for Jornandes, though intelligent and well-informed, was not impeccable even as regards his Gothic kinsmen. Most of his knowledge was derived from his Latin education, and to him probably we owe a good many misconceptions, arising from his acceptance of various geographical names in Latin and Greek writers as referring to his own people and their kindred. Nothing which he has said has had a more enduring influence upon opinion than the statement that Scandinavia, the "vagina gentium," had bred all the barbaric tribes which overpowered the Roman empire. Of course, he knew nothing of Scandinavia beyond the vague facts that Goths, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Cimbri inhabited the southern shores of the Baltic, and that there was a vast land beyond that sea. Everything that descended from the north seemed to have come down from Scania, or Scandinavia. He did not know, as we do, that the climate of Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of China, of which the typical originators, so far as Europe is concerned, were the Huns. No such overflow was possible from Scandinavia.