Of the great pandects copied by the early medieval monasteries of Latin Christendom, only one is, in a real sense, still alive on a public library shelf. It is the codex now kept in Florence under the shelfmark MS Amiatino 1 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, a single volume more than a thousand leaves thick, bound in dark leather over wooden boards, and weighing in at more than seventy pounds. It is the earliest complete Latin Bible to survive, the largest surviving manuscript of the Vulgate, and a manuscript whose journey, from a scriptorium on the English coast to a pope in Rome to a monastery in central Italy to a cardinal’s library to the Laurentian Library where it now sits, traces almost the entire political and religious history of western Europe between the late seventh century and the age of the Medici. It is also the only surviving witness to one of the most ambitious copying projects ever undertaken in the Latin West: a triple pandect of the Bible produced, on a single commission, in the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow at the end of the seventh century.
The codex has been known for at least seven hundred years, but the recognition that it is English, and not Italian, is recent. The inscription above the famous Ezra portrait, long read as identifying the manuscript with a southern Italian context, was not correctly deciphered until 1888, when the Italian scholar Giovanni Battista de Rossi scraped away a layer of overpaint and revealed underneath the words Ceolfrith of the English, abbot and servant of the brethren of the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow. The text on the page had been there for centuries, hidden under a wash that a later restorer had applied. With the overpaint removed, the manuscript stopped being a problem of southern Italian palaeography and became a problem of Northumbrian English book culture. The full significance of what Wearmouth and Jarrow had made, in the generation after Bede entered the monastery as a child, began to come into focus.
Wearmouth and Jarrow
The scriptorium that produced the Codex Amiatinus was a Northumbrian foundation of exceptional ambition. The story begins with Benedict Biscop, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman of the house of King Aethelwine of Northumbria, who between 674 and 689 made six long journeys to Rome. Biscop was not a typical pilgrim. He was a methodical book-buyer, who brought back from each trip not only the usual devotional souvenirs of a Roman pilgrimage, but whole crates of codices and liturgical objects, and the architects and glaziers to build churches in the Roman style. In 674 he was given land at the mouth of the River Wear by King Ecgfrith, on which he founded the monastery of Wearmouth, the first Benedictine monastery in Northumbria. Five years later, in 679, the same king gave him land on the south bank of the River Tyne, where he founded a sister monastery at Jarrow. Wearmouth and Jarrow were from the start conceived as a single community under a single abbot: the two houses were sister foundations, separated by about ten miles of Northumbrian countryside but sharing the same abbot, the same rule, the same scriptorium, and, in the most practical sense, the same library.
Biscop’s fifth journey to Rome, in 679, was the most consequential for the project that would eventually become the Codex Amiatinus. On that journey he was accompanied by Ceolfrith, who had been a member of the Wearmouth community since its foundation and who would, in 688, succeed Biscop as abbot of the twin houses. The pair purchased, in Rome, a complete Latin pandect of the Bible. The manuscript they acquired is now lost, but it is known to modern scholars as the Codex Grandior, and it had been produced, in the sixth century, under the direction of the Roman statesman and monastic theologian Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator. Cassiodorus, who had served the Ostrogothic kings of Italy as quaestor and praetorian prefect before retiring to found a monastery at Vivarium on his family estates in southern Italy, had assembled a library at Vivarium that included a complete Bible in nine volumes. The nine-volume Bible had been, as far as can be reconstructed, produced under his direction. After his death the manuscript was apparently carried from Vivarium to Rome by one of his successors. It was in Rome that Benedict Biscop bought it, in 679.
The Codex Grandior was more than just a fine manuscript. It had been, in its original Cassiodoran form, the frontispiece of an even larger project: the production of a single integrated pandect of the whole Bible, in a single codex, in the scholarly Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate revision. The pandect project had been one of the principal enterprises of Cassiodorus’s Vivarium, and the survival of the Bible in nine volumes may have been a working copy of the larger project, broken up to be more portable. Either way, the manuscript was the largest and most comprehensive Latin Bible known to the early medieval West. Biscop’s decision to buy it, and Ceolfrith’s later decision to use it as the model for a triple pandect at Wearmouth-Jarrow, were not just purchases of a fine book. They were an attempt to transplant the southern European monastic ideal of a single-volume complete Bible to the Northumbrian church.
The library at Wearmouth-Jarrow grew rapidly after 679. By 692, Bede tells us in his Historia Ecclesiastica, the abbot had accumulated a sufficient library and a sufficient number of scribes to attempt something that no English monastery had attempted before: a triple pandect of the Bible, copied from the Grandior exemplar, in the insular script that the Northumbrian scriptoria had refined from Irish and Roman models. Bede writes, in the famous chapter, that Ceolfrith commissioned tres pandectes novae translationis, three complete pandects of the new translation, that is, of Jerome’s Vulgate revision. The phrasing makes the ambition explicit. A pandect was not just a Bible: it was a Bible in single-codex form, with both Testaments bound together. The form had been used in late antiquity by Eusebius of Caesarea, by Jerome himself, and by a few major Carolingian and Byzantine centres, but it was not the common medieval form. The common medieval form was the multi-volume Bible. To produce three copies of the Bible in single-codex form, in a single scriptorium, in a single commission, was an act of copying on an industrial scale.
The scale of the project is genuinely hard to overstate. The Codex Amiatinus itself, the only one of the three to survive complete, contains 1,030 parchment leaves of approximately 505 by 340 millimetres, with a written area of about 360 by 260 millimetres. The weight of a single codex is approximately seventy-five pounds, more than thirty kilograms. The spine of the bound volume is nearly a foot thick, more than thirty centimetres. Modern scholars estimate that the vellum for a single codex required the skins of more than five hundred calves. For three pandects, the vellum required was the skins of approximately fifteen hundred calves. In 692, when Ceolfrith received from King Aldfrith a grant of additional land capable of raising two hundred head of cattle, Bede notes that the land was specifically allocated to provide the vellum needed to complete the copying. The triple pandect was an economic operation as well as a literary one.
Copying the Pandects
The copying itself is recorded in just enough detail by Bede, and analysed in enough detail by modern palaeographers, for us to form a clear picture of how the work was done. The three pandects were produced in the Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium between the late 680s and the early 710s, with most of the work probably concentrated in the years after 692 when the land grant for vellum had been made. The copying was a team project. The Codex Amiatinus, the only one of the three for which we have direct evidence, was the work of at least seven and possibly nine scribes, working in parallel on different gatherings of the manuscript. Each gathering of parchment would be assigned to one scribe, who would write the text on both sides of the bifolium in his assigned portion of the manuscript. The scribes used a half-uncial script that combined features of the Roman half-uncial of the late antique exemplar with the distinctive insular letterforms that the Wearmouth-Jarrow scribes had developed. The result is a script that is recognisably English but recognisably modelled on the Italian exemplar. The scribe who wrote the text of Ezra on folio 5 recto of the surviving codex has been identified, on the basis of handwriting comparisons with a small set of other manuscripts from Wearmouth-Jarrow, as one of the principal scribes of the scriptorium, possibly Ceolfrith.
The use of parallel scribes is a strong signal that the scriptorium was operating at a high level of organisation. Each scribe had to copy a different portion of the same text, and each scribe had to be able to start and finish his section at a gathering boundary, so that the gatherings could be assembled into a single codex in the right order. The system required careful planning in advance: the scribe who copied Genesis had to know how much text would fit on a single gathering, and to allocate space for the rest of the manuscript in the right proportions. The discipline required is, in fact, exactly the discipline required to copy a codex the size of the Codex Amiatinus, where a single scribe would not have been able to complete the work in less than several years. The use of parallel scribes cut the labour of copying by a factor of perhaps seven to nine, and allowed the three pandects to be produced within the lifetime of the patrons. The fact that all three Copia share the same page format, the same line layout, the same ruling, and the same basic orthography suggests strongly that the parallel scribes were working under a single rubric, possibly a single set of exemplar pages from the Grandior.
The decoration of the surviving codex is modest by the standards of later medieval manuscripts, but is rich enough to mark the Amiatinus as a luxury product. The book has two full-page miniatures and a set of seven folios of canon tables. The first miniature, on folio 5 recto at the head of the Old Testament, shows the scribe Ezra seated before an open book cupboard, or armarium, in which are shelved nine volumes. Above the miniature is the couplet in Latin hexameters that has long been associated with the manuscript: Codicibus sacris hostili clade perustis / Esdra Deo fervens hoc reparavit opus, After the sacred books had been destroyed by enemy devastation, Ezra, in his zeal for God, restored this work. The second miniature, on folio 796 verso at the end of the Old Testament, shows Christ in Majesty. The seven folios of canon tables, on folios 798 recto through 801 recto, set out the concordances of the four Evangelists in a series of arched frames. The decorative style of all three elements has been a major subject of modern scholarship. The Ezra portrait is widely accepted to be a copy, in detail, of an earlier portrait that once fronted the Codex Grandior, possibly a portrait of Cassiodorus himself characterised as Ezra. The Christ in Majesty and the canon tables are in an Italianate style derived from late antique and early medieval Mediterranean models. The two traditions, Northumbrian and Mediterranean, are visible on every illuminated page of the manuscript.
Ceolfrith’s Last Journey
By the time the three pandects had been completed, sometime around the year 713 or shortly after, the situation at Wearmouth-Jarrow had changed. Ceolfrith was getting old. He had been abbot of the twin houses for twenty-five years, and the physical strain of managing both foundations was beginning to tell. In 716 he resigned the abbacy, naming as his successor at Wearmouth an associate named Huaetbert, and appointed as prior of Jarrow a monk named Herefrith, who would later succeed him as abbot. He then announced his intention to make a final journey to Rome, taking with him the third of the three pandects, the Codex Amiatinus, to present as a gift to Pope Gregory II. The other two were to remain in the libraries of Wearmouth and Jarrow respectively, where they could be used as the basis for further copying.
The gift of a Bible to the pope was a recognised form of devotion in the eighth century. Bede records that Benedict Biscop had done something similar on his first journey to Rome, when he had given Pope Agatho a letter and certain small gifts. Ceolfrith’s gift was on a different order of magnitude. The Amiatinus was the largest single-volume Bible then in existence, and the act of carrying it across the Channel and along the Roman roads of Europe to the Lateran was itself a feat. The manuscript was more than seventy pounds in weight, the spine was nearly a foot thick, and the binding had to be made strong enough to survive the journey. Ceolfrith, who had been abbot for a quarter of a century, was by 716 in his mid-seventies. He would not survive the journey himself.
The journey began in early June of 716. Ceolfrith and his companions crossed the Channel into Frankish territory and proceeded along the Roman roads of northern Gaul. Bede, who recorded the journey with care, reports that Ceolfrith fell ill as the party moved south through Burgundy. He died on the road, in the city of Langres, on a date that Bede gives as 27 September 716. The manuscript, which had been carried at the head of the procession for the whole journey, was delivered to the pope by the monks who survived Ceolfrith. Pope Gregory II accepted the gift, and the Codex Amiatinus entered the papal library.
The two other pandects, the ones Ceolfrith had left behind at Wearmouth and Jarrow, did not survive the century. The Viking raids on Northumbria, which began in 793 with the sack of Lindisfarne and continued through the following decades, eventually destroyed both Wearmouth and Jarrow. Wearmouth was sacked in the 840s, Jarrow in the 870s, and the two libraries were dispersed or lost. A small number of fragments of one of the two lost pandects survive in the British Library, identifiable by their handwriting and by their conformity to the page format of the Amiatinus. They are the only evidence that the other two pandects ever existed. They are also the only evidence that Ceolfrith’s triple-pandect project was, in its moment, a Northumbrian English achievement and not a southern European one. The triple pandect was a project that the Anglo-Saxon church of the late seventh century was capable of conceiving and executing, and it was a project that the Anglo-Saxon church, between 793 and the 870s, was unable to preserve.
The Survival of the Codex Amiatinus
The Codex Amiatinus survived the centuries that destroyed its sisters, but only by a sequence of accidents that, taken together, make a separate story. The manuscript remained in the papal library, presumably at the Lateran, for several centuries. By the eleventh century it appears to have been moved to the abbey of San Saba, a Greek-rite Benedictine monastery on the slopes of the Aventine Hill in Rome, which housed a scriptorium that worked in a distinctive form of Beneventan script. The manuscript was rebound in the San Saba scriptorium in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, in a heavy wooden binding covered with decorated sheepskin, and was at that point decorated with the overpaint that would later obscure the inscription identifying Ceolfrith. The San Saba scribes added some marginal and interlinear annotations in Greek, in a working script that suggests the manuscript was being actively used as a scriptural reference by the Greek-rite monks of the abbey, not just preserved as a relic. The San Saba annotations are the first evidence that the manuscript had left the papal library.
By the fifteenth century, the manuscript had passed to a different Roman monastery, the Augustinian priory of San Pietro in Gallicantu on the Aventine. The history of the manuscript in the intervening centuries is poorly documented. From San Pietro in Gallicantu it was acquired, in the early sixteenth century, by the humanist collector and book-hunter Marcello Cervini, who later became Pope Marcellus II for the brief space of three weeks in 1555. Cervini’s collection was sold after his death and eventually passed, by a sequence of purchases, to the Medici family library in Florence, where it was identified as the manuscript now known as MS Amiatino 1. The manuscript entered the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in 1783 with the rest of the Medici manuscript collection. It has been there ever since.
The identification of the manuscript as Northumbrian, rather than Italian, came in 1888. The story has been told often enough that the bare outline is familiar to anyone who works in the field, but the details are worth lingering over. The Italian scholar Giovanni Battista de Rossi, working at the Vatican Library on a project to identify the provenance of Italian manuscripts, was asked by the librarian of the Laurentian Library to look at the Amiatinus and confirm or refute the long-standing view that the manuscript was of Italian origin. De Rossi spent three months in the Laurentian Library, in the winter of 1888-89, examining the manuscript with a magnifying glass. He found, on folio 5 recto, that a thick layer of pigment had been applied over the original inscription identifying the manuscript’s donor. De Rossi removed the overpaint, and underneath the original text emerged: a long inscription identifying Ceolfrith as the donor, and the date as the period of his abbacy. The manuscript was, de Rossi concluded, the very Bible that Ceolfrith had set out to deliver to Pope Gregory II in the summer of 716.
The identification had several immediate consequences for the study of early medieval European book culture. The first was that the largest surviving complete Bible in Latin was not, as had been thought, an Italian manuscript but an English one. The second was that the scriptorium of Wearmouth-Jarrow, already known to scholars from Bede’s account of the foundations, had been capable of producing a manuscript of unprecedented scale and ambition. The third was that the tradition of the Latin pandect, the single-volume Bible, which had been thought to be a Carolingian or Mediterranean innovation, had a precedent in the Northumbrian church of the early eighth century, more than a century before the Carolingian Renaissance.
The de Rossi identification also settled a long-standing puzzle about the Ezra portrait. The portrait had been thought, since the early modern period, to show Cassiodorus himself, on the theory that the manuscript was a Vivarium product. The portrait does, in fact, resemble surviving portraits of Cassiodorus, and the figure on the chair wears robes of the kind Cassiodorus is known to have worn. Modern scholarship has concluded that the portrait is in fact a copy of a now-lost original Cassiodoran portrait that once stood at the head of the Codex Grandior, in which Cassiodorus himself was characterised as Ezra. The portrait was copied, with appropriate modifications, by the Wearmouth-Jarrow scribes when they produced the Amiatinus from the Grandior exemplar. The portrait is thus a double image. It shows, at one remove, Ezra the scribe of the Old Testament, the priest who had returned from Babylon and rebuilt the Temple and restored the Torah after the destruction of the First Temple. It also shows, at two removes, Cassiodorus himself, the Roman statesman and monastic founder who had done for his own era what Ezra had done for the returned exiles, the painstaking restoration of the holy books after a period of disorder. And it shows, at three removes, Ceolfrith and his monks, who had done for the Vulgate in Northumbria what Cassiodorus had done for the Vulgate in Vivarium, and what Ezra had done for the Torah in Jerusalem.
Modern Scholarship and the Manuscript Today
The Codex Amiatinus has been a major subject of modern scholarship since the de Rossi identification. The most ambitious modern study is the multi-volume facsimile edition published between 2000 and 2002 by Firenze University Press under the editorship of Giovanni Carrara and Pier Giorgio Troncarelli, which combines a full photographic facsimile with a critical edition of the text and a set of scholarly essays. The edition confirmed most of the de Rossi conclusions, refined the chronology of the copying, identified the seven or nine scribes whose work can be distinguished in the manuscript, and produced a new text of the Vulgate that takes the Amiatinus as its base manuscript. The edition has been described by Giuliano tempestivi, writing in the introduction, as a project that took the manuscript out of the category of the precious museum object and put it back into the category of the working text.
The text of the Codex Amiatinus is in many respects the most accurate text of the Vulgate to survive from the early medieval period. The editors of the critical edition of the Vulgate, the Benedictines of San Girolamo in Urbe in Rome under Pope Pius X and his successors, used the Amiatinus as one of their principal witnesses, and in a substantial number of verses the text of the Amiatinus has been preferred to the text of the other great Vulgate pandects because the Amiatinus text is closer to what Jerome himself is thought to have written. The manuscript is, in this sense, not just an artefact but a witness: a manuscript whose authority for the text of the Latin Vulgate is higher than that of any other surviving copy.
The manuscript is, in addition, one of the principal witnesses to the early medieval Latin Vulgate text that circulated in England. The Northumbrian Vulgate tradition was a particular recension of the Vulgate text that had been carefully copied and preserved in the English church, and the Amiatinus is the largest and most complete witness to that tradition. Scholars studying the Vulgate text have used the Amiatinus to reconstruct the form of the Latin Bible as it was read in the English church in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. The same scholars have used the Amiatinus to identify borrowings by later English writers from the Vulgate, and to date the composition of anonymous Anglo-Saxon biblical commentaries by the form of the Vulgate text they cite.
The Codex Amiatinus remains, in the early twenty-first century, one of the treasures of the Laurentian Library. It is housed in a special climate-controlled case in the library’s manuscript room, and is brought out for consultation only on application to the director’s office. The manuscript is occasionally lent to major exhibitions; it was shown at the British Library in 2005 as part of an exhibition on the Lindisfarne Gospels and the early medieval Northumbrian church, and at the Laurentian itself in 2017 in an exhibition marking the 550th anniversary of the library’s opening. The manuscript’s value as a museum object and as a witness to the text of the Vulgate is, in this sense, undiminished. The manuscript’s particular role as a witness to the ambition and the cultural self-confidence of the Anglo-Saxon church is now better understood than it was a century ago, and it is increasingly recognised as one of the great monuments of early medieval European book culture.
The story of the Codex Amiatinus is also, in the end, a story of how a single manuscript can hold together several centuries of European political and religious history in a single object. The manuscript was commissioned in Northumbria at the end of the seventh century, by an abbot who had inherited the scriptorium of the founder of Wearmouth-Jarrow and who had himself walked to Rome and back as a young monk. It was copied by a team of scribes in a scriptorium that had been the centre of the most ambitious book-production project of its time in the Latin West. It was carried across the Channel and along the Roman roads of Europe by an old abbot who did not live to deliver it. It was received by a pope who appreciated its size and its ambition. It was rebound by Greek-rite monks in a Roman monastery in the eleventh century. It was acquired by a humanist book-collector who became pope for three weeks in the sixteenth century. It was identified as Northumbrian by a Vatican librarian in the nineteenth century. It is read, today, by scholars of the Latin Vulgate who treat it as the most accurate single witness to the text that Jerome himself produced. The whole of that story is held in a single manuscript, on a single shelf in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.
That, in the end, is what makes the Codex Amiatinus one of the great manuscripts of the Latin Bible. The manuscript is not the only complete Vulgate to survive; several others, including the Carolingian pandects and the Alcuinian Bibles of Tours, are also complete and of comparable size. But the Amiatinus is the earliest, the largest, and the only one whose journey through European history is recorded, at every stage, in a continuous chain of documentary evidence. We know, in detail, who commissioned it, who copied it, who carried it, who received it, who preserved it, and who recognised it. We know its date, its place, and its patrons. We know the exact quantity of vellum required to make it and the exact sequence of scribes who wrote it. We know, from Bede, the year in which our house commissioned it and the year in which our patron set out on his last journey. We know, from the later binding and the Greek annotations of San Saba, the manuscript’s later life in a Roman monastery. We know, from the sixteenth-century Medici acquisition, its later place in a Florentine collection. We know, from the de Rossi identification, when the manuscript’s English origin was first recognised. And we know, from the modern facsimile edition, exactly how the manuscript was made and how its scribes worked.
Few manuscripts in the world can be traced, in this detail, through so many centuries. The Codex Amiatinus is, in this sense, one of the best-documented books of the early medieval West, and one of the most ambitious. Its making, its travel, and its survival together describe, in a single object, the history of the Latin Bible from the time of Jerome to the twenty-first century.
References
- The Codex Amiatinus — Library of Congress World Digital Library.
- Entry point to the Scriptorium Bede knew at Wearmouth and Jarrow: The Canon Tables of the Codex Amiatinus — OpenEdition Books, IRHiS.
- Bede’s Life and Work — Dickinson College Commentaries on Historia Ecclesiastica.
- The 1300 Year Pilgrimage of the Codex Amiatinus — The Umilta.net pilgrimage archive.
- The Codex Amiatinus: the Earliest Surviving Complete Bible in the Latin Vulgate — Jeremy Norman, History of Information.
- Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible (video) — Khan Academy, with Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Claire Breay.
- Bede the Venerable, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Book V, chapter 21 (the chapter on Ceolfrith and the three pandects). Available in translation at Dickinson College Commentaries.
- Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), Book I (the description of the Vivarium scriptorium and the original Codex Grandior project).
- Meyvaert, Paul, “Bede and the Codex Amiatinus” — Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 1996), pp. 671–693.
- Troncarelli, Pier Giorgio, ed., Codex Amiatinus: Edition and Studies (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2000–2002), three volumes, including a facsimile, a critical edition, and a set of essays.
- Brown, Michelle P., Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms (London: British Library, 1994), entry on the Ezra portrait of the Codex Amiatinus.
- Gameson, Richard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 1, c. 400–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapters on Wearmouth-Jarrow and the Northumbrian pandect tradition.
- Webster, Leslie, and Michelle P. Brown, eds., The Transformation of the Roman World AD 400–900 (London: British Museum Press, 1997), chapters on Anglo-Saxon book production.