The St Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Lib. MS. 286) is an illuminated Gospel Book which dates from the 6th century and has been in the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 1575. It was made in Italy and has been in England since fairly soon after its creation; by the 16th century it had probably already been at Canterbury for almost a thousand years. It has 265 leaves measuring about 252 x 196 mm,The manuscripts of Sedulius, Carl P. E. Springer Google books and is not entirely complete, in particular missing pages with miniatures.
This manuscript is the oldest surviving illustrated Latin (rather than Greek or Syriac) Gospel Book,, Lewine, 489 and one of the oldest European books in existence. Although the only surviving illuminations are two full-page miniatures, these are of great significance in art history as so few comparable images have survived. "When this manuscript was made, Latin was still generally spoken, and Jerome [author of the Vulgate translation, of which this text is a copy], who died in 420, was then no more distant in time than (say) Walter Scott or Emily Brontë are to us."
The Church of England calls the book the Canterbury Gospels, though to scholars this name usually refers to another book, an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon gospel book written at Canterbury, now with one portion in the British Library as Royal MS 1 E VI, and another in the Library of Canterbury Cathedral.
History The manuscript is traditionally, and plausibly, considered to be either a volume brought by St Augustine of Canterbury to England with the Gregorian mission in 597, or one of a number of books recorded as being sent to him in 601 by Pope Gregory the Great – like other scholars, Kurt Weitzmann sees "no reason to doubt" the tradition.Weitzmann, 22. There is another, unillustrated, possible survivor of the group in the Bodleian Library, the oldest copy of the Rule of St Benedict. The main text is written in an Italian uncial hand which is widely accepted as dating to the 6th century – Rome or Monte Cassino have been suggested as the place of creation.Schiller, II 14 It was certainly in England by the late 7th or early 8th century when corrections and additions were made to the text in an insular hand. The additions included tituli or captions to the scenes around the portrait of Luke, not all of which may reflect the intentions of the original artist.See Lewine, 487
The book was certainly at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury in the 10th century, when the first of several documents concerning the Abbey were copied into it.De Hamel (2016), p.18 The first abbey-related entry is in a tenth-century Old English hand – the ninth-century bequest of Ealhburg, who, in exchange for the monks' daily singing of psalm 20 on behalf of her husband, granted the abbey various products from her estate at Bradbourne, Kent. Among other documents pertaining to the abbey are a land charter in the name of Wulfric, abbot of St Augustine's (989–1005) and a twelfth-century list of holy relics kept in the abbey which include fragments of the Virgin Mary's cloak and the True Cross, the hair of St. Cecilia, and a finger of St. Gregory the Great. In the late Middle Ages it was "kept not in the Library at Canterbury but actually lay on the altar; it belonged in other words, like a reliquary or the Cross, to Church ceremonial".Pacht, 11. In the same way the Book of Kells was stolen from the sacristy, not the library, at Kells in the 11th century. The manuscript was given to the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge as part of the collection donated by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1575, some decades after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was traditionally used for the swearing of the oath in the enthronements of new Archbishops of Canterbury, and the tradition has been restored since 1945; the book is taken to Canterbury Cathedral by the Parker librarian of Corpus for each ceremony.Archbishop of Canterbury official website . The Augustine Gospels have also been taken to Canterbury for other major occasions: the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1982,John Paul II: reflections from The Tablet, p. 36, Catherine Pepinster, John Wilkins, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005, , and the celebrations in 1997 for the 1,400th anniversary of the Gregorian mission.Independent, 1997 In 2023 the Gospels were carried in the procession at the coronation of Charles III and Camilla. As far as is known it is the first time they have been used in a coronation. The book was open at the page with the portrait of Saint Luke.
The manuscript was rebound at the British Museum in 1948–49 with plain oak boards and a spine of cream alum-tawed goatskin.De Hamel (2016), p.18
Text The manuscript is "more or less the oldest substantially complete copy" of Jerome's translation of the Gospels. His late-4th-century Vulgate gradually replaced the earlier Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") text used by Christians in the Roman Empire. A 1933 analysis of the St Augustine Gospels by Hermann Glunz documented around 700 variants from the standard Vulgate: most are minor differences of spelling or word order, but in some cases the scribe chooses readings from the Vetus Latina. This supports the St Augustine connection, as Gregory the Great, the supposed donor, wrote in his Moralia that he was using the more fluent Vulgate, except for certain passages where he found the Old Latin more suitable, and his Forty Homilies on the Gospels opts for the older translation in the same places as the St Augustine Gospels.De Hamel (2016), p.33-6
Miniatures
The manuscript once contained evangelist portraits for all four Evangelists, preceding their gospel, a usual feature of illuminated Gospel books, and at least three further pages of narrative scenes, one following each portrait page.Weitzmann, 18–19, Beckwith, 143. Other writers think the full complement of two pages, a portrait and a grid of scenes from the gospel, preceded each gospel. Only the two pages preceding Luke have survived. However the surviving total of twenty-four small scenes from the Life of Christ are very rare survivals and of great interest in the history of Christian iconography, especially as they come from the old Western Empire – the only comparable narrative Gospel cycles from manuscripts in the period are Greek, notably the Rossano Gospels,These were created in Byzantine Italy in a Byzantine style. Beckwith, 143 mentions comparable ivories. and Sinope Gospels, or the Syriac Rabbula Gospels. The equivalent Old Testament cycles are more varied however, including the Greek Vienna Genesis and Cotton Genesis, the Latin Ashburnham Pentateuch, the Quedlinburg Itala fragment, and some others.
The miniatures have moved further from classical style than those in the Greek manuscripts, with "a linear style which not only flattens the figure, but begins to develop a rhythmic quality in the linear design which must be seen as the beginning of a process of intentional abstraction".Weitzmann, 22 For another historian, the figures in the small scenes have "a linear form which we immediately perceive to be medieval" and "are no longer paintings, but tinted drawings. The same tendency is exhibited in the treatment of the architecture and ornament; the naturalistic polychrome accessories of a manuscript like the Vienna Dioscurides are flattened and attenuated into a calligraphic pattern."Hinks, 69. See also Beckwith, 143
The subject of the influence of the miniatures on later Anglo-Saxon art has often been raised, though in view of most of the presumed picture pages of this manuscript now being lost, and the lack of knowledge as to what other models were available to form the Continental post-classical aspects of the Insular style that developed from the 7th century onwards (with Canterbury as a major centre), all comments by art historians have necessarily been speculative. It is clear from the variety of styles of evangelist portraits found in early Insular manuscripts, echoing examples known from the Continent, that other models were available, and there is a record of an illuminated and imported Bible of St Gregory at Canterbury in the 7th century.Wilson, 94 Later works mentioned as probably influenced by the Augustine Gospels include the Stockholm Codex Aureus and the St Gall Gospel Book.Alexander, J. J. G., Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 1 (London, 1978) – see comments on Parker Library Bibliography below. In general, though evangelist portraits became a common feature of Insular and Anglo-Saxon Gospel books, the large number of small scenes in the Augustine Gospels were not seen again until much later works like the Eadwine Psalter, made in the 12th century in Canterbury, which has prefatory pages with small narrative images in grids in a similar style to the Augustine Gospels.Page from the Morgan Library . These leaves are dispersed, though most of the manuscript, one of the copies of the Utrecht Psalter, is at Trinity College, Cambridge. See Parker Bibliography, comments, passim.
Evangelist portrait of Luke Of the four portrait pages, only that for Luke survives (Folio 129v). He is shown sitting on a marble throne, with a cushion, in an elaborate architectural setting, probably based on the scaenae frons of a Roman theatre – a common convention for Late Antique miniatures, coins and Imperial portraiture. The pose with the chin resting on a hand suggests an origin in classical author portraits of philosophers – more often evangelists are shown writing. Above a cornice sits the winged ox, Luke's evangelist's symbol. The pediment has an inscription with a hexameter from the Carmen Paschale by the 5th-century Christian poet Coelius Sedulius (Book 1, line 357):Springer, same page and link "Iura sacerdotii Lucas tenet ore iuvenci" – "Luke holds the laws of priesthood in the mouth of the young bull" (iuvencus meaning also "young man").
More unusually, twelve small scenes drawn from Luke, mostly of the Works of Christ (who can be identified as the only figure with a halo), are set between columns in the architectural frame to the portrait. This particular arrangement is unique in surviving early evangelist portraits, though similar strips of scenes are found in ivory book-covers from the same period.Hinks, 69–70 The scenes themselves probably drew from a now-destroyed fresco cycle of the Life of Christ in Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome.Schiller, I 155
The scenes, many of which were rarely depicted in art from later medieval periods,See Schiller, and The Eadwine psalter: text, image, and monastic culture in twelfth-century Canterbury, p. 29, Margaret T. Gibson, T. A. Heslop, Richard William Pfaff, Penn State Press, 1992, , . There is a slightly different list in Google books Francis Wormold in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Peter R. Ackroyd and others, Cambridge University Press, 1975, , include: The Annunciation to Zechariah (left, top, Luke 1, 8–20), as he officiates at the Temple Christ among the Doctors (left, 2nd down, Luke 2, 43–50) which omits Saint Joseph, probably from lack of space; Mary enters to the left.Google books, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, Leslie Brubaker, p. 84, Cambridge University Press, 1999, , Christ preaching from the boat (left, 3rd down, Luke 5, 3) The Calling of Peter (left, 4th down, Luke 5, 8) The Miracle of the son of the widow of Naim, (left, 5th down, Luke 7, 12–16) at the "gate of the city". The Calling of Matthew, a very rare scene (left bottom, Luke 5, 27–32).