9 - Patterns of Meaning in Insular Manuscripts: Folio 183r in the Book of Kells

Summary

Early medieval Christians were constantly faced with the problem of how to communicate the mysteries of their religion in a manner consonant with its inherent complexity and paradoxicality. Early exegetes, while noting that human knowledge about divine matters could only ever be incomplete, stressed that any insight into the gospel text would come only through patient and thoughtful rumination. Early medieval art reflects this difficulty as well, as sculpture, manuscripts and other objects often present images beguiling in their visual and conceptual complexity. In many works, it is clear that medieval makers sought to multiply and extend the frames of reference as far as possible, encouraging their beholders to think creatively and subtly about scripture. In service of this goal, every visual form might be imbued with some kind of meaning or reference, whether representational or seemingly abstract. Scholars of medieval art have recently begun to think more seriously about the capacity of ‘minor’ forms of visual enhancement, such as ornament and calligraphy, and seemingly incidental qualities, like colour and medium, to participate in the production of meaning within a work. The concept of early medieval graphicacy, as it has been articulated by Ildar Garipzanov, has the potential to help us do so with greater lucidity.

Garipzanov’s formulation of early medieval graphicacy is centred on abstract shapes which might find expression as letter-forms, frames, and ornamental motifs. In this essay, I will argue that we must attend carefully to the role that colour, scale, and patterning play in producing meaning in nonfigural graphic forms, and also to the ways in which graphic signs interact with – are woven seamlessly into – a larger sign system that encompasses calligraphic writing, representational imagery, and ornamental patterning. It is only by seeing how such various signs work together that we can begin to understand medieval graphicacy.

There are many early medieval works that show such complex interactions of signs, but I will confine myself in this essay to a close reading of a single page from the Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58). Although scholars and the public alike have to expressed astonishment over the calligraphic and ornamental forms in the Book of Kells for centuries, the rich symbolic capacities of those forms have not been considered until relatively recently.