The Visual Semiotics of Insular Illuminated Manuscripts

Abstract Manuscript production in the islands of Britain and Ireland from the late fifth to mid-ninth centuries made a significant contribution to the cultural history of the post-Roman and early medieval West and to the history of the book. Rich prehistoric and Romano-British traditions of art and of learning, much of it oral, combined with the fervour of the newly converted to foster a thirst for knowledge and of the Christian faith and the Mediterranean world that had fostered it. The post Romano-Britons, the Irish, the Picts and the Anglo-Saxons, who had carved kingdoms out of what had been the Roman province of Britannia, and gradually coalesced to form England, competed and / or collaborated, as historical circumstances dictated; and their influences can be seen interacting on the pages of their books, from masterworks such as the Books of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Codex Amiatinus and the Book of Kells to Mercian prayerbooks made by and for women and Insular works made in the continental mission fields. They made important contributions to the development of the legibility of text, to a stable system of scripts matching form to function, to punctuation and the use of illumination not only as decoration or illustration but also as a means of navigating and articulating the text and of digging deeper into its meaning in a kind of ‘visual exegesis’. Insular books thereby made an influential contribution to the history of publishing and to salvaging the learning and culture of Antiquity and the Early Christian period from the wreckage of the western Roman Empire.