Sixty previously undetected drawings have been discovered in the Lindisfarne Gospels - nearly 1,300 years after the illuminated Latin manuscript was created as one of the world's greatest artistic treasures.
The discovery, made by a senior British Library scholar using a high-magnification binocular microscope, was said yesterday to show that the volume marked the birth of the first distinctively and proudly "English" culture.
Another key finding of the research is that the dating of the gospels - one of the prime sourcebooks of English Christianity - should be moved forward from the long-accepted AD698 to about AD720.
This means that the Venerable Bede, author of the first English history book, is now thought likely to have also been involved in producing the masterpiece.
The drawings have been identified by Michelle Brown, curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. She disclosed this at the weekend in a 23-page lecture, with 130 footnotes, to an astonished audience of scholars in Bede's seventh century church at Jarrow, close to the site of the original Lindisfarne monastery on Holy Island, Northumberland.
Last night she said, "The audience all leapt up in their seats. It was the most incredible feeling".
Study of the drawings, discovered on the back of calf hide parchment, established them as by far the earliest known use of a metal-point pen, a forerunner of the pencil. No other metal-point drawings are known to have existed before 1100.
In many of the drawings, the artist also used paint that washed through to the front of the parchment. This can still be faintly seen. But the metal-point outlines are invisible to the naked eye.
Some traces of drawings were noted when the Lindisfarne Gospels were last closely examined at the British Museum in the 1950s. Ms Brown said they were not found then, partly because microscope technology was less advanced.
"I went looking for them. It was a bit like looking at an archaeological site."
She used steeply angled light. "Lo and behold, the drawings were there - like the plough marks you get in a field."
Invasions
What she had discovered was a series of practice sketches on every page of the manuscript. They were the doodle-pads used by a monk working in an era of recurrent invasions, when monasteries in remote, rocky places such as Lindisfarne were refuges of learning and art.
The artist is believed to be Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to 721. A note inserted in the manuscript two centuries later said he "originally wrote this book in honour of God and St Cuthbert and the whole company of saints whose relics are on the island".
He practised script letters, visible under the microscope as ridges and furrows in parchment. He also tried out preliminary versions of flowers, birds and other images. He did this preparatory work on the backs of parchments because calf hide was too expensive to be used as sketchpaper. The significance of the styles in which he drew will be the topic of scholarly analysis and theory for decades.
Ms Brown said these indicated that he was "consciously creating a new English culture". The sketches proved that he had begun by planning to write the gospels in a traditional Roman half-uncial script familiar from the culture of Lindisfarne's more civilised mother churches in Rome and the Mediterranean. But in his finished manuscript, he changed tack radically. He fused this style with Anglo-Saxon runic letters, some of them only seen before on pagan inscriptions.
"He was grafting these on to Mediterranean script," Ms Brown said. "He was having to make up his font as he went along. It was a conscious decision. It was the first time runic figures had been used in a book."
Images of flowers and ducks' heads in the sketches and manuscript showed Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences. For the nobles, visiting clerics, pilgrims and foreign dignitaries who first saw the gospels, these would have been clear messages.
They proclaimed to Rome that the young English church was "no provincial outpost but vibrant and integrated", she said in the lecture. "A prime motivation was to define what it meant to be Northumbrian, to be English and to be a part of the wider Christian church. The style of lettering was important. It needed to ring bells in the audience's mind of both 'Englishness' and 'Romanness'."
Yesterday she added: "It was to show that Anglo-Saxons were up to the minute. It was the way you got a newly Christianised people to pull together."
Her argument for redating the manuscript is based on evidence about its style and technical production. Bede, a monk at Jarrow 40 miles from Lindisfarne, which had close links with it, was 47 years old in 720. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People was finished in 732.
"I think Bede would have been consulted about the thinking behind the production of the gospels," Ms Brown said. "One of the figures in the volume's painting of St Matthew relates to a theological issue he raised."
Link
British Library Lindisfarne page
