The books made by Insular monks and nuns during the earlier fifth century stand as monument to their contribution to the transmission of scripture, to the preservation of elements of the cultures of northern European prehistory and of the Graeco-Roman world, and to the transition from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Display scripts are a striking feature of Insular book production. The illuminated incipit page reached its zenith in the great Insular gospel books, wherein it formed an essential part of the programme of decoration. A successive fusion of Uncials and New Roman cursive would similarly give rise to fully developed half-Uncial as a more economical solution to the need for a legible, prestigious book script. The use of minuscule scripts also characterises the later members of the Southumbrian Tiberius group of manuscripts such as the Royal Prayerbook, the Book of Nunnaminster and the Book of Cerne.

This chapter talks about the comparison of Anglo-Saxon intellectual culture with that of Frankish Gaul. Both Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish Gaul inherited the Roman script system. Many of the later eighth-century manuscripts from Francia and Italy reflect the early years of the Carolingian Renaissance. The chapter discusses the importance of the preservation of knowledge, copying of essential texts, compilations of excerpts from a range of authoritative authors and the building up of libraries with mainline as well as more obscure patristic and early medieval writers. There is one further genre of Christian writing to which many individuals, in every part of western Europe, made particularly creative contributions in the eighth century, and this is hagiography. From the overwhelmingly biblical and patristic orientation of early medieval intellectual endeavour one can gain a crucial indication of the formative influences and characteristics of early medieval religion and the institutional and intellectual frameworks established to support it.