Put your eye close to the glass and the most famous manuscript in the world turns out to be a book. The Chi Rho page of the Book of Kells, folio 34r, is usually reproduced as an image, a field of colour with no evident purpose, and its effect on the modern viewer is close to religious. Stand instead in the darkened room in the Treasury below the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, where the object itself is kept, and the effect changes completely. You are looking at one opening of a codex of 340 prepared calfskin leaves, and the opening you are looking at is two pages of Latin. The book was written first. The pictures were put on afterwards.<\/p>\n
Trinity College Dublin MS 58. That is the shelfmark, and the Library’s own digital catalogue entry for it is a small masterpiece of compression: the manuscript is given a date of “approximately 800”, the languages Latin and Irish, and three named contributors, the binder Roger Powell, the donor Henry Jones, and Saint Columba as an associated name. Three layers of history in a single record: a craft, a patron, and a saint. The catalogue also records what the object has become. Two of its four volumes are normally on display, one opened at a major decorated page and one at a text opening, and the pages on show are changed every eight to twelve weeks. The College’s visitor guide, Visit Trinity, maintains a public list of the Book of Kells pages on display, which is worth consulting precisely because it is a list of openings rather than of pictures.<\/p>\n
Look at what is actually in the case. The leaves measure roughly 330 by 255 millimetres, which is not what they were born: they were severely trimmed, and their edges gilded, in a nineteenth-century rebinding, and the trimming is the reason the surviving book is a uniform rectangle rather than the irregular series of skins a monastic workshop actually produced. A careless binder made the volume tidy at the cost of whatever ran off the top and bottom of the pages. The Book of Kells survives as 340 leaves, 680 pages: around thirty folios went missing in the medieval and early modern periods, and the great treasure that once covered it, described in the Annals of Ulster as golden and bejewelled, was torn away in the eleventh century.<\/p>\n
What a visitor actually sees, when the page is turned, is a page of writing. The text of the four Gospels runs in a single long line across the width of the leaf, with generous space above and below, in brown iron gall ink. The letters are large, round and firm. They are what a modern reader would call decorative, and they were not; they are a formal book hand, Insular majuscule, and the size of the writing is one of the most telling facts about the book. One of the four scribes set eighteen or nineteen lines to the page, another almost always seventeen. That is not the density of a working breviary. It is the density of a book meant to be seen across a church, or read aloud from a lectern by a voice that knows the text already.<\/p>\n
The physical structure is legible if you know how to read it, and the Book of Kells Project has done the work of counting. The book is made up of thirty-eight quires, each of five bifolia, so ten leaves and twenty pages apiece. Around 250 marginal arabesques are distributed across 158 pages. There are more than 740 extended letters, the long-stemmed forms that reach up into the margin, and more than 900 instances of the et-ligature, the single stroke that binds two letters together and saves the scribe the effort of lifting his pen. Thirty-three pages are fully illuminated and fourteen more carry substantial ornament that does not cover the whole leaf.<\/p>\n
Some of those pages are famous beyond the reach of scholarship. Folio 1r carries a portrait of Christ enthroned, with two angels and, at the margins, the mice and otters and fish that have given the manuscript its domestic reputation; the same folio holds the abraded miniature of the four evangelist symbols, which must be viewed with the volume turned on its side. Folio 7v carries the Virgin and Child, folio 291v the surviving portrait of John. Two narrative scenes of extraordinary ambition survive, the Arrest of Christ and the Temptation, and they are among the earliest such images in any Gospel manuscript. There is no portrait of Mark or of Luke, and the likeliest explanation is the dullest one: they were single leaves, they worked loose, and they were lost.<\/p>\n
What this adds up to is a book that is not one object but several, and that has been physically reassembled more than once. The page people queue for is the Chi Rho page, folio 34r, which introduces Matthew’s account of the nativity with the first words of John’s Gospel worked into the opening letters: In principio erat verbum. The Library of Trinity College Dublin calls it the single most famous page in medieval art, and it is, but it is also a leaf with writing on it, in a codex of 340 leaves that has been put together, broken up, trimmed, gilded, rebound into four volumes and finally, in 1953, taken apart again by a bookbinder named Roger Powell so that it could be made safe to show.<\/p>\n
The support is calfskin, prepared into vellum. The pigments are the surprise, and the Library’s conservation research has been unusually public about why. The method is micro-Raman spectroscopy, which identifies a pigment from the molecular light it scatters back. The findings were first presented at the British Association Festival of Science in 2005 and published in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy in 2009, and they alter the received picture of the manuscript in several consequential ways.<\/p>\n
Start with the blue. It is indigo, the plant dye, not ultramarine from lapis lazuli. The Library’s account of the pigments states that blue from lapis lazuli was probably not used in the manuscript at all, as had previously been thought, and the research confirms it: the deep saturated fields that photographs reproduce as brilliant are not ground stone but a vegetable pigment laid down in layers. That matters beyond connoisseurship. Lapis lazuli was reachable in the early ninth century; its absence has to be explained rather than assumed, and the explanation tells against a book made in a Mediterranean workshop and for one made on an island where the nearest imported luxury was, in the end, a pigment that could be grown.<\/p>\n
The rest of the palette is equally domestic. Red comes from red lead. Yellow is orpiment. Green was made by combining indigo with orpiment, or by using verdigris, the copper acetate that forms when vinegar or wine acts on copper. Black is carbon and iron gall ink, the standard western European ink formula, brewed in the monastery like everything else. The white is gypsum. Every one of these is obtainable in a monastic workshop with a furnace, a kiln and a still. Nothing on the page needs to have crossed the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n
And then there is no gold. The Book of Kells has no shell gold and no gold leaf that the analysis can find. The shimmer that the photographs produce comes from yellow orpiment and red lead used cunningly to suggest a metallic surface. This is not a diminishment but a revelation, and the Library’s catalogue makes it explicit: three artists seem to have produced the major decorated pages, and one of them, whose work can be seen on the Chi Rho page, was capable of ornament of such extraordinary fineness and delicacy that his skills have been likened to those of a goldsmith. A goldsmith who never used gold. The illusion was the achievement.<\/p>\n
Then there is a sentence in the Library’s account that ought to be read more often. A copper green, reacting with damp, was responsible for perforating the vellum on a number of folios. The corrosion is not a metaphor for the damage the book has suffered. It is the damage, and it is still happening. Verdigris is a salt; in the presence of moisture it migrates, it eats, and eventually it goes through the skin. The leaves a conservator can handle today are the leaves a scribe in about 800 prepared and scraped and stretched. The pigment is, in the most literal sense, eating its way out of the object.<\/p>\n
The limits of such evidence should be stated plainly, because they are often overstated. Pigment analysis establishes what is on the page, not who put it there. It can show that the manuscript was not made in a Mediterranean atelier, because it contains no lapis lazuli; it cannot tell you which of the candidate scriptoria in the North Atlantic world actually held the pen. What it does is narrow the field of the possible, and leave the hard work of palaeography and codicology to finish the job.<\/p>\n
Because the physical analysis cannot settle the question, the argument falls back on the hand, and the hand of the Book of Kells is the reason for the date that is generally placed at about the year 800. Francoise Henry’s study of the manuscript identified at least three scribes, whom she named Hand A, Hand B and Hand C, and a fourth has since been proposed for a single folio. The Library’s own catalogue puts it more simply: four major scribes copied the text.<\/p>\n
Their habits are distinct enough to be recognisable across four hundred leaves. Hand A wrote the opening matter, folios 1 to 19v, then a long stretch from 276 to 289, and then from 307 to the end of the book, in the brown gall ink used throughout the West, at eighteen or nineteen lines to the page. Hand B appears on folios 19r to 26 and 124 to 128, uses more minuscule, writes in red, purple and black as well as brown, and varies the number of lines. Hand C wrote the bulk of the text, at almost always seventeen lines, and is more given to minuscule than Hand A. Where the hands overlap, the differences in ink and in letter forms are small, which is itself evidence: these were people trained in the same house, or in houses so closely connected that their hands agree. The Library’s digital catalogue records the further observation that one scribe was responsible only for text and left the decoration of letters at the beginning of verses to an artist, while another, who may have been the last in date, used bright colours for the text and filled blank spaces with the unnecessary repetition of certain passages.<\/p>\n
And three artists produced the major decorated pages. This produces a workshop of at least seven people: four scribes, three painters, plus the people who prepared the skins, ground the colours and ruled the pages. The Library’s catalogue puts the central question of the manuscript’s study in a single sentence: the extent to which there was an identity between scribe and artist is among the key unanswered questions about the manuscript. Whether the man who wrote a text page also painted the initial that opens it is not known, and probably cannot be known for every page; but the division was clearly not absolute, and in a workshop this size somebody must have been in charge.<\/p>\n
The script itself is a piece of argument. Insular majuscule, the great formal hand of the Irish and Northumbrian schools, is built out of display devices: the extended letters that climb into the margin, the ligature that fuses two letters into a single movement of the pen, the uncial a that breaks the regularity of the line. Each of these deliberately breaks the grid of the page. The effect is to make the eye read pattern before it reads words, and that is a choice about what the book is for.<\/p>\n
There is a further clue in how the writing went wrong. When a line would not quite fit, the scribe turned back and completed it in the blank space of the line above, a manoeuvre called the turn-in-path. There are many uncorrected mistakes in the text, and the book was produced with appearance taking precedence over practicality. Combined with the scale of the writing and the size of the workshop, this yields a floor for the date that palaeography alone cannot move: a codex of this bulk, in this hand, with this much pigment, assembled by this many people, could not have been produced in a hurry. The date of about 800 is not a guess imposed on the evidence. It is what the evidence will bear.<\/p>\n
Which raises a difficulty often left unstated. Such a lavish volume, in the most economical reading of its function, would have been kept on the high altar and brought out only for the reading of the Gospel during Mass, with the reader very likely reciting from memory rather than following the page. The Kells is not a codex in the modern sense, a container for information. It is an offering, and its text is the shape of the offering.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the part that is still, after all the attention given to the pictures, badly underdiscussed: the text is a scholarly instrument, and it was assembled by people who knew what they were doing.<\/p>\n
The Latin is based on the Vulgate, the translation Jerome completed in 384, “intermixed with readings from the earlier Old Latin translation”, in the Library’s formulation. In H. A. G. Houghton’s catalogue of the Latin New Testament manuscripts the Kells text is entered as a witness of its own, with a letter and a name of its own; it is recorded as one column of seventeen lines, black ink with much coloured decoration, and the text as it survives breaks off in the seventeenth chapter of John. The proportion of the text that agrees with the Vulgate is high but not uniform: on the reckoning set out in that catalogue it runs to close to nine words in ten across the four Gospels, and distinctly lower in Matthew than in Luke. The Kells is therefore not a pure Vulgate manuscript. It is a working copy, a text with readings drawn from the older Latin tradition and, in places, from the memory of the person writing it down.<\/p>\n
Around that text sits an apparatus, and it is the apparatus that reveals what kind of book this was. There are four kinds of prefatory material. The fullest description of them remains Grokipedia’s article on the Book of Kells, whose account of the preliminary leaves, their order and their losses rests on Francoise Henry’s study of the hands and on Bernard Meehan’s catalogue of the codex.<\/p>\n
First, the canon tables: a concordance of Gospel passages common to two or more of the evangelists, compiled in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea, working from the sectional analysis of the Gospel story first made by Ammonius of Alexandria. F. Bechtel’s account of the Ammonian sections, written for the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, sets out the mechanism. The sections number some 1165 in all, and from the fifth century they were indicated in the margins of nearly all Greek and Latin manuscripts. Eusebius took the ten tables that Ammonius had suggested and filled them so that a reader could see at a glance where each Gospel agreed with or differed from the others: in the first nine, the numbers of the sections common to all four, to three, or to two evangelists, set in parallel columns, and in the tenth, the sections peculiar to each evangelist in turn. The section numbers themselves were Greek letters. The system was, in other words, an indexing machine, and the tables in the Book of Kells occupy folios 1v to 6r. They were planned for twelve pages and condensed into ten, which is why folios 6v and 7r are blank: the two empty leaves are the fossil of a decision, a space left over because the tables were made smaller than the book had room for.<\/p>\n
Here is the extraordinary part. The canon tables do not work. The scribe compressed them into confusion, and, far more seriously, the section numbers that the tables refer to were never entered in the margins of the text. Bechtel describes how the system was meant to work in practice: opposite each section of the Gospel the number was written, and beneath it the number of the Eusebian table to be consulted for the parallel text, so that a reader could go from any passage to its counterparts in the other three Gospels in seconds. That marginal apparatus is exactly what the Book of Kells does not have. With no numbers in the margins there is nothing to cross-reference to, and the tables are reduced to an ornament. The most scholarly apparatus in the manuscript is inert, and it is inert because of an omission whose reason nobody can now establish.<\/p>\n
Second, the Breves causae, summaries of the Gospel narratives. These belong to a pre-Vulgate tradition: they are summaries of the Old Latin translations of the Gospels, divided into numbered chapters. Folio 8r opens the Breves causae of Matthew with the words Nativitas Christi in Bethlem, the birth of Christ at Bethlehem, and it is one of the most lavishly decorated pages in the book. Their chapter numbers are likewise absent from the text pages, and scholars doubt they would ever have been used even if the manuscript had been completed, because the numbering keyed to the Old Latin summaries and would have been difficult to reconcile with the Vulgate text the scribe was actually writing.<\/p>\n
Third, the Argumenta, collections of legends about the evangelists. And fourth, the lists of Hebrew names: a glossary of the Hebrew names contained in the Gospels, which survives in two fragments. One is on the recto of the first surviving folio, and contains the end of the list for Matthew; the names missing from Matthew would require another two folios. The other is on folio 26, which now stands at the end of the prefatory matter for John and contains about a quarter of the list for Luke, whose full list would need three more folios. Here the quire structure settles the question: it is very unlikely that three folios are missing between 26 and 27, so folio 26 is almost certainly not in its original position. Somebody, at some point in the manuscript’s long life, moved a leaf.<\/p>\n
And the order of the prefatory matter is itself evidence of the greatest kind, because it is not evidence of decoration but of the sequence of the pages. The Breves causae and Argumenta are arranged oddly: Matthew’s Breves causae and Argumenta first, then Mark’s, and then the Argumenta of both Luke and John followed by their Breves causae. This anomalous order mirrors that found in the Book of Durrow. From the slavish repetition of the order used in Durrow, T. K. Abbott, the Librarian of Trinity College, concluded that the scribe of the Kells used Durrow as his model. Durrow is a Columban book. So the strongest single piece of evidence connecting the Book of Kells to Iona is not a stylistic judgement about interlace and beasts; it is the sequence in which somebody stacked up a table of contents.<\/p>\n
Put the pieces together and the picture that emerges is not the one the popular account gives. The Book of Kells is an unfinished, partly disordered, partly redundant scholarly instrument: a concordance apparatus for reading the four Gospels against their Old Latin predecessors, assembled by people who understood the apparatus so well that they copied an existing example rather than designing a new one, and then never finished the job. What was completed to the last leaf was the ornament. That is precisely why the manuscript reads to most people as decoration. Its apparatus is invisible. The Greek letters were never entered. The chapter numbers were never entered. What remains in view is the picture, and the picture is the one thing that was properly finished.<\/p>\n
Which brings us back to the oldest question, and the one most often answered too confidently.<\/p>\n
The traditional answer is that the Book of Kells was made by Saint Columba. The earliest historical reference to the book, and to its presence at Kells, is the entry for 1007 in the Annals of Ulster, which records the theft of “the great Gospel of Columkille” and its recovery a few months later, minus its golden and bejewelled cover, “under a sod”. The Annals of the Four Masters place the book at Kells. But Columba died in 597, and the tradition that assigns the manuscript to him has long been discredited on palaeographic and stylistic grounds: most of the evidence points to a composition date around 800, more than two centuries after his death. The tradition tells us how the book was thought about in the eleventh century. It does not tell us who wrote it.<\/p>\n
The Library’s own position is the most carefully balanced statement of the question available, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. The date and place of origin of the Book of Kells have attracted a great deal of scholarly controversy; the majority of academic opinion now tends to attribute it to the scriptorium of Iona in Argyllshire, but conflicting claims have located it in Northumbria or in Pictland in eastern Scotland. A monastery founded around 561 by Saint Colum Cille on Iona, an island off Mull in western Scotland, had become the principal house of a large monastic confederation. And then the Library sets out the moment that makes the whole question so hard: in 806, following a Viking raid on the island which left 68 of the community dead, the Columban monks took refuge in a new monastery at Kells in County Meath, and for many years the two monasteries were governed as a single community. It must have been close to the year 800 that the Book of Kells was written, although there is no way of knowing if the book was produced wholly at Iona or at Kells, or partially at each location.<\/p>\n
That is the honest state of the question, and it is the Library talking rather than a populariser. The dates are the difficulty. The book was made at the precise moment when the raid of 806 had scattered the community that made such books and sent it into a new foundation in Ireland, and when the whole Columban federation, which had for two centuries drawn Northumbrian houses into its orbit, was in motion. The house of Jarrow is the classic case of a Northumbrian community that on the traditional account was moved bodily to Iona in the seventh century, and it is because the Northumbrian candidates for the Kells scriptoria are houses with a Columban pedigree rather than native Northumbrian foundations that they can be proposed at all. In a decade of raids and flight, a book begun in one house and finished in another is not a scandal but an ordinary hazard of the trade.<\/p>\n
What is certain is the shape of the custody. After the rebellion of 1641 the church at Kells lay in ruins, and in the middle of the seventeenth century Cromwell’s cavalry was quartered in the building. Around 1653 the governor of the town, Charles Lambert, Earl of Cavan, sent the book to Dublin for safekeeping, in the interests of a manuscript that had by then survived eight hundred years of neglect and one determined act of theft. A few years later it reached Trinity College through the agency of Henry Jones, who had been scoutmaster general to Cromwell’s army in Ireland and vice-chancellor of the University, and who became Bishop of Meath in 1661. The Library’s 2012 exhibition of its own history records the gift plainly: the College’s greatest treasures, the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow, were presented by Ussher’s pupil Henry Jones, vice-chancellor of the University and bishop of Meath.<\/p>\n
It arrived at a moment of institutional upheaval and extraordinary good fortune. The College had been founded by Elizabeth I in 1592, with a charter that was later surrendered for that of Charles I, as the Library’s own history of itself records; and T. K. Abbott’s history of the College, written for its tercentenary, notes that the first library was built in the 1590s and 1600s by Fellows sent to London to buy books, and that by 1610 it held almost four thousand volumes. Then the private library of Archbishop James Ussher, more than ten thousand volumes, was bought by Cromwell’s soldiers for twenty-two thousand pounds, held for years in Dublin Castle, and formally ordered into the College by the Irish House of Commons on 31 May 1661, to be preserved for public use. The Kells came in through the same door, in the same decade, as the salvage of a confiscated national collection. The building that would hold it for the next three centuries did not yet exist: as the Library’s account of the Old Library records, the foundation stone was not laid until May 1712.<\/p>\n
One near-miss is worth examining closely, because it shows how the received account and the physical evidence can part company. The danger to the book in the seventeenth century is usually told as fire: a blaze in the college library in the mid-1660s, near-misses and water damage and a binding lost. The Library’s own published history of its collections does not single the Kells out among the losses of those years, and what the object demonstrably carries is more precise than that story. The original cover was torn off in 1007 and never replaced. The leaves were trimmed and their edges gilded in the nineteenth century. Copper green reacting with damp has perforated a number of them. Around thirty folios are gone. One leaf has been moved out of its place. None of these is dramatic, and all of them are certain, which is a better foundation for a history than a blaze with a date.<\/p>\n
The nineteenth century was the great turning point in the object’s physical fortunes, and it was not a good one. The Library is plain about it: the leaves were severely trimmed and their edges gilded in the course of rebinding, so that what we now measure is the shape of a nineteenth-century binder’s ideal rather than the shape of the book. It was also the century in which the manuscript entered public display and scholarly attention, and in which the reputation that now surrounds it was formed. By the middle of the century it was on show in the Old Library, and it has drawn more than half a million visitors a year ever since.<\/p>\n
The twentieth century brought the first serious attempt to save the thing rather than to exhibit it. Roger Powell was an English bookbinder and restorer who trained in the workshop of Douglas Cockerell and succeeded him as tutor in charge of bookbinding at the Royal College of Art. The dictionary of descriptive terminology for bookbinding records that he was commissioned to restore the Book of Kells for the Trinity College Library in Dublin in 1953, the Book of Durrow in 1954, and the Book of Armagh and the Book of Dimma in 1956 and 1957, and that he was awarded the degree of Master of Arts, honoris causa, from Trinity College in 1961 and the OBE in 1976. The same source sets out his governing principle: he places soundness of construction, in both materials and method, ahead of decorative design, and believes that the actual design of a binding must be an integral part of the binding itself, because a book is a tangible object meant to be used. What he did to the Kells in 1953 was to take it apart, repair the tears, reinforce the weakened areas, stretch the pages that had developed bulges, and bind the whole thing again in four volumes, one for each Gospel.<\/p>\n
Four volumes was not an aesthetic decision. It was a way of letting the book be shown. One opening can be exposed at a time; the rest of the manuscript rests. The book is not being read, but it is being consulted, and the consultation is what the four volumes exist to make possible.<\/p>\n
The science has moved faster than the binding. The Library’s conservation research published the pigment analysis described earlier, and the conservation laboratory now works with the techniques one would expect in a forensic laboratory rather than a workshop: humidifiers, fume hoods, and DNA analysis of the vellum, which can establish not only the species and sex of the animal but, most importantly, where the skins came from. That last point is still experimental, and it has already overturned a commonplace: the Trinity team has found that female calves were slaughtered for vellum as well as males, against a long-standing assumption that only the skins of male animals were used. It is a small correction with a large implication, because it changes the economics of the book by removing one of the usual explanations for the expense of fine calfskin.<\/p>\n
Peter Murray wrote in the Irish Examiner in 2012 that the keeper of manuscripts, Bernard Meehan, had overseen the complete conservation of the manuscript and studied it for many years before writing the detailed description and history of the Book of Kells. That is the point worth holding on to. The conservation of the Kells and the scholarship of the Kells are the same activity. Nobody can restore a manuscript without codicology; nobody can collate its text without knowing how the leaves were folded, sewn and quired; nobody can explain a pigment without knowing what the pigment was for. The modern reading of Kells has been made possible by the hands that have kept it alive, and those hands are now doing the work the original scribes left unfinished.<\/p>\n
What remains unresolved is a list worth reading aloud. Which room it was written in. How many hands there were, and whether one of the four scribes was also one of the three artists. Who the goldsmith was. Whether the Eusebian section numbers were ever written into the margins and then lost, or were never written at all. Where folio 26 belongs, and by whose hand it was moved. And, at the top of the list, the question the Library itself puts first: whether the book was produced wholly at Iona or at Kells, or partially at each. The answer, on the evidence available, is that it was produced by a community in transit, and that the transit is the most likely explanation for what we find in the object: a text drawn from the Vulgate and the Old Latin at once, an apparatus copied from a model and never indexed, a set of prefatory sheets in the wrong order, and a decoration so complete that it has outlasted everything else the book was for.<\/p>\n
Yvonne Gordon reported from the Long Room in December 2025 as the Old Library prepared to close for restoration and empty out, some two hundred thousand volumes moving to off-site storage in fireproof and waterproof boxes, with the oldest and most valuable holdings kept on campus in a new store in the Ussher Library. The Kells itself is below the Long Room in the Treasury, in a darkened room where light, humidity and temperature are monitored and photography is not permitted, and it will move again to the refurbished Printing House when conservation work begins in 2027. It has been stolen and buried, trimmed and gilded, soaked and corroded, rebound and taken apart again, lit and photographed and digitised, and it has not been read continuously by anybody for more than a thousand years.<\/p>\n
And yet the text is still there. Continuous, legible, in a hand large enough to read from a lectern, collatable word by word against the Old Latin and the Vulgate by anyone with access to a critical edition. That is what the object was for, before the pictures were added and after they were added and through every century in between. We have inherited it as a marvel of ornament because the ornament is what was finished and the ornament is what survives in the imagination. But the pages in the Treasury are still a text, written first, by several people, on animal skin, in the dark, for readers who have not yet arrived.<\/p>\n
Put your eye close to the glass and the most famous manuscript in the world turns out to be a book. The Chi Rho page of the Book of Kells, folio 34r,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,9],"tags":[762,764,763,766,769,493,767,756,765,768],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripture-interpretation","category-text-transmission","tag-book-of-kells","tag-gospel-book","tag-insular-manuscript","tag-iona","tag-irish-monasticism","tag-pigment-analysis","tag-scriptorium","tag-textual-transmission","tag-trinity-college-dublin","tag-vellum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}