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Ultán the scribe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Lawrence Nees
Lawrence Nees
Affiliation:
The University of Delaware
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Extract

According to Aediluulf's poem De abbatibus, written in the early ninth century, the Irish priest Ultán was ‘a man called by a famous name’ (preclaro nomine dictus), who ‘could ornament books with fair marking’ (comptis qui potuit notis ornare libellos). Active during the first half of the eighth century in Aediluulf's otherwise unknown monastery located most probably in the area of what is today southern Scotland or northern England, Ultán has also won growing renown in modern art-historical writing, on the basis of Aediluulf's text, our only source for his life and work. Several of the older general reference works for artists include his name, Thieme-Becker terming him ‘Kalligraph und Miniator’, Bénézit ‘enlumineur et calligraphe’ and Bradley more cautiously ‘calligrapher’ while repeating the statement of the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland, that Ultán was scriptor et pictor librorum optimus. In other words, these early sources agree in making Ultán not only a scribe but also a painter or illuminator.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 22 , December 1993 , pp. 127 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 The most comprehensive discussion of the poem, its date and contents, is found in the Introduction to Aethelwulf De abbatibus, ed. Campbell, A. (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar, from which 1 quote. Although Aethelwulf is the most common spelling of the author's name in the scholarly literature, Michael Lapidge has recently pointed out that that spelling is a ‘late West Saxon normalisation’, and I have followed him in writing Aediluulf; see ‘Aediluulf and the School of York’, Lateinische Kultur im VIII. Jahrhundert. Traube-Gedenkschrift, ed. Lehner, A. and Berschin, W. (St Ottilien, 1990), pp. 161–78, esp. 161, n. 3.Google Scholar I am not entirely persuaded by Lapidge's attempt to locate Aediluulf's monastery at Crayke, north of York (ibid. pp. 174–8), although his interesting and plausible arguments make a much stronger, albeit inconclusive, case than Howlett, D. R.'s earlier attempt to locate the monastery at Bywell, in ‘The Provenance, Date, and Structure of De abbatibus’, AAe 5th ser. 3 (1975), 121–30.Google Scholar

2 Some early scholarly works confused the Ultán described in Aediluulf's poem, a figure active in approximately the second quarter of the eighth century, with another Irish monk and hermit with the same name active roughly a century earlier, who was abbot at Péronne before his death in 656. See The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Stephen, L. and Lee, S., 22 vols. (Oxford, 1921–1922) XX, 21Google Scholar, and Strickland, W. G., A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols. (Dublin and London, 1913) II, 472.Google Scholar

3 Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart begründet von Ulrich Thieme und Felix Becker, ed. Vollmer, H., 37 vols. (Leipzig, 1939) XXXIII, 564: ‘Ultan, irischer Heiliger, Mönch in Lindisfarne, Kalligraph und Miniator, d. 656(?)’ Both the date and the location of the monk at Lindisfarne are certainly erroneous.Google Scholar

4 Bénézit, E., Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, rev. ed., 10 vols. (Paris, 1966) VIII, 428: ‘Ultan, enlumineur et calligraphe à Lindisfarne, mort en 656(?)’Google Scholar

5 Bradley, J. W., A Dictionary of Miniaturists, Illuminators, Calligraphers, and Copyists, 3 vols. (London, 1889) III, 334: ‘Ultan, Calligrapher, saec. XIV, an Irish Monk, called by Leland Scriptor et pictor librorum optimus.’Google Scholar

6 I have not attempted to make a systematic search for all references, but from the substantial number of studies that I have consulted the statement that Ultán is ‘generally absent’ from the early scholarly literature seems to me fair. Two exceptions worth noting are Stokes, M., Early Christian Art in Ireland (London, 1887), p. 28Google Scholar, with a very free and misleading translation of the portion of Aediluulf's text treating Ultán, and Brown, G. Baldwin, The Arts in Early England, 6 vols. in 7 (London, 1903–1937) V, 341. Baldwin Brown cites the text in order to demonstrate that ‘in Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature the one word “scribe” is used as the title of the executant’, and thus that the identification of Ultán as a scribe is not inconsistent with his activity as a painter, which Baldwin Brown takes as established by other passages.Google Scholar

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18 Bruce-Mitford, , ‘The Durham-Echternach Calligrapher’, p. 188, n. 48.Google Scholar

19 For Columba, see Bullough, D., ‘Columba, Adamnán, and the Achievement of Iona’, Scottish Hist. Rev. 43 (1969), 111–30Google Scholar, and 44 (1970), 16–33 with earlier literature. It may be noted that p. 31Google Scholar of the second part of the former study is the source of the witty statement responsible for the title of Ó Cróinín's article. For Columba as a scribe, see the literature assembled by Alexander, J. J. G., Insular Manuscripts 6th to the 9th Century (London, 1978), pp. 28–9 (no. 4).Google Scholar

20 The description of Wilfrid's foundation at Ripon treats along with the architecture of the church and its furnishings a book of the gospels ordered by Wilfrid (evangelia de auro purissimo in membranis depurpuratis, coloratis … scribere iussit). Bertram Colgrave's translation of the passage inserts the loaded term ‘illuminated’ here in a manner unjustified by the Latin text, translating the passage ‘ordered [the gospels] to be written out in letters of purest gold on purpled parchment and illuminated’; see The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. Colgrave, B. (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 36–7. Coloratis, the word presumably translated by ‘illuminated’, is grammatically linked with membranis depurpuratis rather than with scribere, but Colgrave's translation implies something on the order of scribere et colorare iussit. The author has just finished saying that the book was of a sort ‘unheard of’ (inauditum) in our times, and might have thought that his readers needed to be told that parchment purpled (membranis depurpuratis) signified parchment coloured (coloratis); a more accurate translation would be ‘written out in letters of purest gold on parchment coloured purple’ (literally ‘on purpled, coloured, parchment’).Google Scholar

21 Among the many discussions of Benedict's collection of books and patronage of book production, see Parkes, M. B., The Scriptorium of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Jarrow Lecture 1982 (Jarrow, 1982), with earlier bibliography.Google Scholar

22 See Kosmer, E., ‘Master Honoré: a Reconsideration of the Documents’, Gesta 16 (1975), 63–8. No one denies the importance of the anonymous Master of the Breviary of Philip the Fair as a distinct artistic personality responsible for several important works; the problem is in the forced joining of a body of work with an alluring document that promises a name.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , p. xxxGoogle Scholar: ‘His poem on the history of his house was, no doubt, inspired by Alcuin's poetical history of the church of York’ For the ‘York poem’, see now Godman, P., Alcuin: the Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York (Oxford, 1982), esp. pp. xliv, lxxv and xci–xciiGoogle Scholar, and Bullough, D. A., ‘Hagiography as Patriotism: Alcuin's “York poem” and the early Northumbrian vitae sanctorum’, in Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés IVe–XIIe siècles (Paris, 1981), pp. 339–59.Google Scholar

24 The phrase preclaro nomine dictus is used by Aediluulf not only for Ultán but later in the poem for the priest Hyglac, a ‘famous lector’, of whom we are told only that although blind he could perceive ‘with the eyes of the mind’, and was seen by others to appear in a heavenly vision. If Wilhelm Levison was correct in connecting Aediluulf's Hyglac with the lector of the same name mentioned in the Book of Cerne (Englandand the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 301–2), then one might by analogy argue that Ultán was also a distinguished but not oustandingly famous figure. It might also be observed here that if one wishes to associate Ultán with existing illuminated manuscripts, the Book of Cerne (unlike the other proposed candidates) at least offers some oblique documentary support for the connection.Google Scholar

25 Sims-Williams, P., ‘The Evidence for Vernacular Irish Literary Influence on early Medieval Welsh Literature’, Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe. Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Whitelock, D., McKitterick, R. and Dumville, D. (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 235–57, esp. 248 and n. 55Google Scholar. See also Kamphausen, H. H., Traum und Vision in der lateinischen Poesie der Karolingerzeit (Bern and Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 86–114, who similarly stresses the local, domestic nature of the poem.Google Scholar

26 Baldwin, Brown, The Arts V, 341Google Scholar. Evangeliorum quattuor Codex Lindisfarnensis, ed. Kendrick, T. D., Brown, T. J., Bruce-Mitford, R. L. S. et al. , 2 vols. (Olten and Lausanne, 1960) II, 5–11Google Scholar. An intriguing example of such usage not mentioned by Julian Brown occurs in Trier, Domschatz 61, an eighth-century book probably from Echternach, in which one of the fullpage miniatures, that on 5v, bears the inscription Thomas scribsit. Thomas was certainly both the writer of portions of the gospel text and ‘illuminator’ of this and several other pages, signing his most extraordinary and original pictorial creation as the ‘writer’ For the manuscript, see Alexander, , Insular Manuscripts, pp. 52–4 (no. 26) and fig. 110Google Scholar. The manuscript was recently the subject of an extended study by Netzer, N., The Trier Gospels (Trier Domschatz MS 61): Text, Construction, Script and Illustration (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Harvard Univ., 1986).Google Scholar

27 Recently Jeffrey Anderson has discussed the absence of a stable technical jargon for manuscript illumination during the early Byzantine period: ‘On the Nature of the Theodore Psalter’, Art Bull. 70 (1988), 550–68, esp. 558CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have not been able to see the article by Pierre-Yves Lambert in Ireland and Northern France AD 600–850, ed. Picard, J.-M. (Blackrock, 1991)Google Scholar, which according to Clare Stancliffe (in a review in Early Medieval Europe 1 (1992), 87–8) includes discussion of ‘Hiberno-Latin and Old Irish words to do with the work of scribes’.Google Scholar

28 Codex Lindisfarnensis, ed. Kendrick, et al. II, 7–8.Google Scholar

29 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , p. 18.Google Scholar

30 Stokes, , Early Christian Art, p. 28.Google Scholar

31 Baldwin, Brown, The Arts V, 341Google Scholar. This is the translation repeated by Brown, T. J., Codex Lindisfarnensis, ed. Kendrick, et al. II, 11.Google Scholar

32 This is my own translation. Campbell unfortunately confuses the issue by rendering the same verb ornare first by ‘adorned’ and second by ‘ornamented’

33 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , pp. 48–9 (lines 618–19).Google Scholar

34 Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1968), pp. 1191–2, s.v. nota.Google Scholar

35 Ibid. p. 37, s.v. como.

36 For these three manuscripts, see Alexander, , Insular Manuscripts, nos. 18 and 27 respectively, with several illustrations; here also a number of other manuscripts of this order of decoration.Google Scholar

37 For the text and an extended and very interesting commentary upon it, along with a questionable application of the text to the Book of Kells rather than a lost Book of Kildare which Giraldus says he is describing, see Henderson, , From Durrow to Kells, p. 195, with the earlier literature.Google Scholar

38 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , pp. 48–9 (lines 599–601).Google Scholar

39 Campbell warns (p. xxxi) against reading Aediluulf too literally, noting close similarities between some of his specific descriptions of his monastery and other texts: ‘When phrases are borrowed from older works, are the facts they demonstrate borrowed also, or were the phrases borrowed because the facts had repeated themselves?’Google Scholar

40 See Cróinín, Ó, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, pp. 356–7.Google Scholar In criticizing the author's use of Ultán to attack the Bruce-Mitford theory of Eadfrith's involvement with the Lindisfarne Gospels, I do not mean to reject entirely Ó Cróinin's healthy scepticism concerning one of the – in fact very shaky – ‘firm facts’ concerning early Insular illumination.

41 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , p. xxi, n. 3.Google Scholar

42 Ibid. p. 231. On p. xvii Campbell suggests that the manuscript in London (British Library, Cotton Tiberius D. iv), which reads pectorem here, ‘has very few errors peculiar to itself, and those it has are of an obvious nature’ He adds that London has ‘the slight error pectorem (for pict-), while O and C [the other two manuscripts, in Oxford and Cambridge respectively] independently made it worse’

43 Traube, L., Karolingische Dichtungen, Schriften zur germanischen Philologie 1 (Berlin, 1888), 31.Google Scholar

44 That is, on the earlier edition of the poem by Ernst, Dümmler, MGH, PLAC 1 (Berlin, 1881), 582–604Google Scholar, with the reading vectorem (p. 590)Google Scholar, noting the variants in the two other manuscripts. Campbell, (p. xiii) also has a very low opinion of Düsmmler's efforts on the text.Google Scholar

45 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , p. xvGoogle Scholar. Lapidge, M., ‘The Present State of Anglo-Latin Studies’, in Insular Latin Studies, ed. Herren, M. (Toronto, 1981), pp. 45–82, esp. 46, was sharply critical of Campbell's editions of Aethelwulf and other authors, terming them often lacking ‘critical judgment and historical perspective’ and eventually needing to be redone.Google Scholar

46 Indeed, as Paul Meyvaert pointed out to me, the evidence of the manuscripts of De abbatibus collated by Campbell in his apparatus criticus shows frequent confusion of vowels, especially in the London and Oxford manuscripts. For the confusion of e and i in early medieval, and especially Insular, Latin, see Löfstedt, B., Der hiberno-lateinische Grammatiker Malsachanus, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Latina Upsaliensia 3 (Uppsala, 1965), 99–100.Google Scholar

47 On the relationship of the manuscripts, see Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , pp. xv–xxi, esp. xix.Google Scholar

48 Ibid. p. xxxiv.

49 For some remarks on the magic power of the gospel manuscript in particular, and of its decoration, see Nees, L., The Gundohinus Gospels (Cambridge, MA, 1987), pp. 189–212, with further literature.Google Scholar

50 Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1377, s.v. pictor.Google Scholar

51 Ibid. p. 2019, s.v. vector.

52 I am grateful to Robert Somerville for bringing this point to my attention, together with the observation that in both locations (lines 158 and 205) the editor accepts the reading of the London and Cambridge manuscripts together against the readings pectori and pectoris of the Oxford manuscript.

53 Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1586, s.v. rector.Google Scholar

54 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , p. xl.Google Scholar

55 Campbell, , p. xxxix, aptly and ironically notes of this trope that ‘only less frequently than hypallage does metonymy occasion false interpretations of poetry. This trope involves the use not of the most logically appropriate word, but of one denoting a closely related idea’.Google Scholar

56 Jaeger, E., ‘Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?’, Speculum 65 (1990), 845–59, with numerous examples and also discussion of the patristic sources for this usage in Augustine and other Latin writers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57 Aethelwulf, ed. Campbell, , pp. 18–19Google Scholar. Although not at issue in the present investigation, the translation of pectore here as ‘mind’, while supported by the Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1377, seems to me somewhat arbitrary. The problem with such a rendering is its placement in the phrase. If the poet has sensibly organized his four terms, the first two are mental, namely feelings and words, and the last two physical, flesh and pectus, which we might render literally with muscle or perhaps sinew, or more loosely as bone, that is ‘feelings, words, flesh, and bones’.Google Scholar

58 I am grateful to Douglas MacLean for reminding me of Blair's, P. Hunter statement in his Roman Britain and Early England 55 B.C.–A.D. 871 (New York, 1963), p. 94, that the very name Northumbria is, uniquely among other names of kingdoms, purely geographic rather than ethnic, and includes peoples of whatever race or language living there.Google Scholar

59 On the issue of Irish manuscripts written on the Continent, see Nees, L., ‘The “Irish” Manuscripts at St. Gall and their Continental Affiliations’, Sangallensia in Washington. Arts and Letters in Medieval and Baroque St. Gall as viewed from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. King, J. C. (forthcoming), with bibliography.Google Scholar

60 This is not to say that Latin usage did not vary, only that such variance did not prohibit or even substantially limit cultural interaction across secular linguistic boundaries in the monastic milieu. For example, Sims-Williams, , ‘Evidence’, p. 248, gives a brief discussion of the Hiberno-Latin phrase castra beorum that appears in line 567 of Aediluulf's poem, providing a number of possible mechanisms whereby the phrase could have become known to the Anglo-Saxon Aediluulf, and although he wonders what ‘the average Northumbrian cleric’ might have understood from the phrase, such a problem is hardly serious enough to affect the comprehension of the poem as a whole.Google Scholar

61 Still an important study of the scribal colophons, limited in this case to Irish manuscripts, is Plummer, C., ‘On the Colophons and Marginalia of Irish Scribes’, PBA 12 (1926), 11–44Google Scholar. I have discussed some of the Insular and related continental material in ‘The Colophon Drawing in the Book of Mulling: a Supposed Irish Monastery Plan and the Tradition of Terminal Illustration in Early Medieval Manuscripts’, CMCS 5 (1983), 67–91, esp. 81–91Google Scholar, with further bibliography. The phenomenon of individual creativity characterizes art at this period on the other side of the English Channel as well, as I have argued in general terms in ‘The Plan of St. Gall and the Theory of the Program of Carolingian Art’, Gesta 25 (1986), 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, with regard to the production of illuminated manuscripts in particular, in my review of the facsimile publication of the Dagulf Psalter in Art Bull. 67 (1985), 681–90.Google Scholar

62 The fundamental work remains the contributions by Bruce-Mitford, R. L. S. to Codex Lindisfarnensis, ed. Kendrick, et al. Google Scholar More recently the manuscript was discussed at considerable length in similar terms in the more readily accessible publication by Backhouse (cited above, n. 8). An interesting recent study concerning the individuality of the means of construction of one of the carpet pages, in contrast to the apparently quite similar but in fact differently derived design in the Lichfield Gospels, is Stevick, R., ‘The 4 × 3 Crosses in the Lindisfarne and Lichfield Gospels’, Gesta 25 (1986), 171–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 For the fullest and most recent presentation, The Durham Gospels, ed. Verey, C. D., Brown, T. J. and Coatsworth, E., EEMF 20 (Copenhagen, 1980). For a detailed and valuable rebuttal, see Ó Cróinín, ‘Pride and Prejudice’.Google Scholar

64 For an extended discussion of this issue, see Nees, L., ‘The Originality of Early Medieval Artists’, Literacy, Politics and Artistic Innovation in the Early Medieval West, ed. Chazelle, C. (Lanham, New York and London, 1992), pp. 77–109Google Scholar. For a broader context, with many fascinating and often specific analogies to the development of art-historical scholarship, see Gould, S. J., Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London, 1989).Google Scholar

65 Alexander, , Insular Manuscripts, p. 42 (no. 11)Google Scholar, mentions the fact that ‘flaws in the parchment are decorated with orange dots. One on f. 17 is in the shape of a duck’. Most recently the same peculiarity was singled out for attention in McKitterick, R., ‘The Diffusion of Insular Culture in Neustria between 650 and 850: the Implications of the Manuscript Evidence’, in La Neustrie. Les pays au nord de la Loire de 650 à 850, ed. Atsma, H., 2 vols., Beihefte der Francia 16 (Sigmaringen, 1989) II, 395–432, esp. 424, with the remark that ‘one can only applaud the aplomb of an artist who can thus transform a defect into an ornament’.Google Scholar

66 Alexander, , Insular Manuscripts, p. 42, notes the use of dots to outline the minor initials, and illustrates the eagle in colour as his fig. 59.Google Scholar

67 Ibid. fig. 55.

68 Of course it is true that beasts defined exclusively by a surrounding row of dots may be found on the Luke initial page of the Lindisfarne Gospels (Alexander, ibid. fig. 46) and elsewhere, very likely deriving from metalworking traditions, but I know of no such outline-dotted beast circumscribing a parchment flaw, and even if one were to be found it would seem to me perverse to explain such a feature on the basis of a model rather than an attitude and personal idiosyncracy.

69 Although certain details of its interpretation appear unconvincing, a stimulating presentation of the individual characteristics of this great artist remains Werckmeister, O.-K., Irischnorthumbrische Buchmalerei des des 8. Jahrhunderts und monastische Spiritualität (Berlin, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the controversy concerning this artist, see the literature collected by McKitterick, , ‘Diffusion’, p. 424, n. 163.Google Scholar

70 A shortened version of this paper was presented at the Edinburgh conference, ‘The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Britain and Ireland (Second International Conference on Insular Art)’ in 1991, and some of its material was delivered at the annual meeting of the College Art Association of America in 1988. This study was written during my tenure as a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, to whose faculty and staff I am most grateful. Many scholars offered their generous assistance and advice, including Donald Bullough, Robert Somerville, Otto-Karl Werckmeister, and especially Douglas MacLean and Paul Meyvaert, although I should hasten to excuse all of my colleagues from any responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation that yet remain.