Art of Illuminations

Above: Book of Lindisfarne

There can be no doubt that the art of illumination was brought from Ireland to Iona whence it spread over Scotland and England. Evidence of this is furnished by the Book of Lindisfarne at the British Museum, the Book of MacDurnan at Lambeth, besides Psalters at Cambridge and the British Museum, all famous for the beauty of their illustrated pages. Subsequently the art found its way to the Continent and spread there until the leading libraries of Europe had illuminated copies of " The Voyage of Brendan " and other subjects, all close rivals of the Book of Kells, and most of them the work of Irish missionaries. An exquisite example, now in Bavaria, has been graphically described by Watten-bach. His paper, in German, has been translated into French in the Revue Celtique  and into English in the Kilkenny Archaelogical Journal. Both Professor Westwood and Dr. Keller " express the opinion that the Irish style of penmanship was generally adopted on the Continent and continued to prevail there until the revival of art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries."
Over sixty remarkable scribes are mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters before the year 900, forty of them between the years 700 and 800, and mainly bishops and abbots. Olchobhar, Feidlimidh and Cormac mac Cuileannain, three king-bishops of Munster, who ended their days in 746, 847 and 908, respectively, were all famous scribes. A decade after the death of Cormac—in 918—the Four Masters record the death of the abbot of Ros Cre, " an excellent scribe," the following year, that of the abbot of Bangor, " best scribe of all the Irish race " ; the year next following, the death of " Maolphoil abbot, bishop, anchorite, and best scribe of Leath Chuinn," and of " Abel the scribe who was martyred by the foreigners." As in the case of the poets and the historians, the scribes but continued to multiply through the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. The perfection of their penmanship was scarcely more to be marvelled at than the rapidity of its execution and the corresponding multiplication of manuscripts at home and abroad.
Though the Irish people were reputed exceptionally hospitable in their entertainment of foreign students, there is record of a learned saint of the Deise, named Coisfhionn, who, on being visited by Colm Cille, refused to let him see his books, which were many and rare. From that time forward, at the prayer of " the Dove of the Cell," not a word of the books could be read by anyone, and they rapidly came to decay. Bede, on the other hand, says such virtue lay in the books of the Irish missionaries in general that " the mere scrapings of their leaves which were brought out of Ireland, if put into water and swallowed, were an antidote to the poison of serpents."