NOTES

TWO NOTES ON THE BOOK OF KELLS AND ITS RELATION TO OTHER

INSULAR GOSPEL BOOKS

I. The Canon Tables in Kells and in Royal 7 C XII

In an important paper published in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter éd. W. Kôhler, Mass., 1939, Vol. II, pp. 631 foil., Professor Friend drew attention to two breaks in the Canon Tables of Kells. He accounted for the break in the types of Canon Tables at f. 4V by a Retailed comparison with the Canon Tables of three Carolingian books, Harl. 2788, the Lorsch Gospels, being Vat. pal. lat. 50 and the Gyulafehervar fragment in Rumania, and the Soissons Gospels Paris lat. 8850 and he suggested that Kells derived its Canons from an archetype using Beast Canons under arches with square spandrels but which was defective after the 4th Canon Table. The same break is found in Harl. 2788.

There is a second and more obvious break in Kells. At f . 5V and for the last two Canon Table pages, the arches and columns of the first eight pages are abandoned and replaced by drab frames recalling those in the Book of Durrow or in the Echternach Gospels. Dr. Friend sees in this sudden break the disappearance of the earlier artist or the removal of the manuscript because of the Northern invasion of Iona to a place of safety where the last two pages were added. Curiously enough, a similar break occurs in an Anglo- Saxon fragment in the British Museum, Royal 7. C. XII foil. 2-3. The fragment looks Northumbrian in script and Dr. Lowe has suggested that it may be part of the manuscript formed by

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 197 and British Museum, Cotton* Otho C V (see Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores II Oxford 1935 no. 217). It contains the Canons IX and X arranged in 5 or 6 columns without arches or frames of any kind : space fillers and decorated letters of incipit are the only ornaments. But on f. 3r, where Canon IX begins, the offsets of some fine Insular canon arches can be seen. The reproduction given by Lowe shows them quite clearly to the naked eye. The ultra-violet light reveals five columns, four panels of figures and two arches. These columns have square capitals, are as flat as those in Lindisfarne, are given red borders and are filled with fret or interlace patterns. Royal 7. C. XII then had a set of Canon Tables which was decoratively defective after Canon VIII. This is exactly where the break comes in Kells. The similarity cannot be due to chance. It suggests two things : that the change in the Kells canons was not due to the disappearance of the artist but to an extreme fidelity to a defective model; and that the archetype was also circulating in England, very likely in Northumbria. There would be nothing odd in an Irish Gospel Book deriving a set of Canon Tables from England. Of all the Gospel Books which survive from Ireland or from Irish centres on the Continent, there are, besides Kells, only three which have the Eusebian canons : the Book of Durrow has its canons arranged within rectangular frames on five pages, and of the other two Irish manuscripts with Canons, Armagh has neither frames nor arches and the Book of Mulling, or at least its 9th century additions, only uses

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