Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy, and today we're going to talk about what might be the most beautiful book in the world, the Book of Cows. Yeah, when my mom was in her teens traveling in Dublin, she made sure to visit the Book of Kells as often as she could because back then they used to change the pages over every day or so and you could see a new illumination in new text. And now they only turn the pages of the manuscripts every few months. But when I visited Dublin a little more than a year ago, I made sure to check in with the Book of Kells and um, it's probably the most famous book in the world, maybe the most beautiful, and it's kept at Trinity College, which is right in the middle of Dublin. After taking a look at the famous campus arch, you can take a turn in the college library and there's a whole exhibit devoted to the book. Before getting a glimpse at its pages, the museum impresses upon its visitors the whole significance of this volume. You know what the Book of Kells means and why it's so important, its age, the skill and time it took to make it, the scholarship surrounding it, and the miracle of it even surviving. And finally you get to this packed room where two of the four manuscripts are displayed, and four manuscripts make up the whole. We don't want to give the impression they are different copies, um, but each manuscript represents a gospel, and one has turned to an illuminated page and one to a page of script, and the writing is really shapely and clear, and the illumination is colorful and detailed, and so detailed in fact, that you never could get quite a close enough view and long enough of you and that big crowd of people to to see everything. But it's still amazing to look at something that's so intricate and so beautiful and more than one thousand, two hundred years old old. So no wonder it's often considered Ireland's National treasure and attracts five hundred thousand visitors a year. So let's dive into the history of the book. Yeah, so the Book of Kells isn't just famous for its beauty, and its skill of craftsmanship. It's shrouded in mystery and there are all these misadventures. It's so amazing that we actually still have this book and it's in as good a shape as it is. So for centuries there has been arguments about where it originated, whether it was Ireland or Northern England or Scotland, but the most likely story starts way back in five sixty one or maybe five sixty three. So in five sixty one or five sixty three, the Irish Saint Columba or column Kill which means delve of the Church, who was an Irish monk inscribe, fled Ireland and founded a monastery on Iona, An Island off the west coast of Scotland, and this became a missionary center to people of Irish descent who were living in the area. Yeah, so they were there for a while, but in eight oh six a Viking raid on the island left sixty eight months dead. So the Columbian monks take off. They're not going to risk that happening again, and they moved to a new monastery at Kells in County Meath, which is northwest of Dublin. And the book was probably written close to eight hundred a d. But we can't quite guess if it was written completely at Iona, completely at Kel's or a mixture of both, because you know, after all, a book is pretty portable. You could bring it when you were fleeing to your new monastery. There's some other lesser accepted hypotheses, like one that says it was written in North England, maybe Linda's Farn, the site of perhaps the second most famous illustrated manuscript of the period, Um brought to Iona and then Kells, or maybe right to Kells. Or it was possibly made at an East Scottish monaster. The controversy, but we're going to go with that. Iona to Kell's story. I think, Um, life at Kells isn't easy, are the beautiful manuscript either though? It's the city is constantly being sacked by Danes and locals, lots of Irish infighting. Um, So it's really impressive that it survives this period too, let alone it's it's earlier days we know for sure of its presence and Kells by ten oh six or ten oh seven, and Kati and I were saying, it's so strange thing ten of going one thousands UM and that's when the Annals of Ulster told that quote the Great Gospel of column Kill, the chief relic of the Western world, was wickedly stolen during the night on account of its rot shrine. Two months and twenty days later it was found under assad, missing its gold and jewel encrusted shrine and a few pages. But things still don't look up for the Book of Kells. Its existence is not easy in even the coming centuries, and it's defaced and damaged. And in the twelfth century charters concerning monastery business are copied onto its blank pages, which sounds so weird. Using the Book of Kells's scrap paper essentially horrifying. I'd don't even dog your library book. It's a common practice at the time, though, um you know when paper or vellum is rare. And also in the twelfth century, the monks lost the book. Due to ecclesiastical reform, the monastery at Kell's ceased to exist and the property passed on to the Bishopric of Meath, so the book stayed in what was now the parish church. So it stayed in the same spot. It just was no longer under the monk's protection right, And in sixteen fifty four the Cromwellian cavalry quartered in the church and this was bad news. Um. I'm sure that the people responsible for the book are concerned that the English will run off with it, so they send it to Dublin for safety. And after sixteen sixty one it's officially presented to try the College by Henry Jones, who goes on to become the Bishop of me after restoration, and that's its home now. It has not gotten back to Kell's and we'll talk about that more later. The last terrifying book crime we have to account was not at the hands of the Vikings or the English, but in eighteen twenty one book binder who cut off about half an inch at the outer margins of the book, including decorations, sorts of priceless decoration, and that's just gone. I mean you could imagine I'm sweeping it away. I'm still angry. It's pretty tragic. It's rebound in by a more responsible binder. Um. It's getting kind of messed up after this binding though. The pages that are displayed frequently are having pigment damage and it's just getting soiled because it's touched so much. And our final binding we're going to mention is in nineteen fifty three when it's repaired and rebound by Roger Powell, who was a leading conservation book binder, and he puts it into the four volumes that we know today, which correspond to a Gospel. And um, there we go. So let's talk about the book itself. The Book of Kells is comprised of four Gospels in Latin based on a Vulgate text. The Vulgate edition was written by St. Jerome in a d and that is what ultimately became the definitive Latin version of the Bible. Yeah, and the English versions that we know are based in turn off of the Vulgate. It's interesting though this isn't necessarily um about the Book of Kells, but a lot of the illuminated manuscripts at the time are not pure Vulgate. Um. Many Irish trained monks knew earlier translations of the Gospels and knew them, had had them memorized, and they trusted their memories more than the model that they were given to coffee. So there's sort of like freeform Gospels, like transformation of the Bible. The book was made at the height of Ireland's Golden Age, and it represented an enormous commitment at the monastery's time and resources. We've got a lot of gold involved, a lot of expensive pigments, and lots of monks. There's just lots of manpower, a really time intensive book. You cannot get the Book of Kells on your kindle. And we have to also ask what is it for. It's an oversized book, heavily ornamented. I mean that cover originally was gold with jewels all over it. So it's not made for a private devotional. It's not what you retreat to your cell with and look over. It's probably something that would have been carried in ceremonial processions like Easter, for example, and then placed on an altar facing out toward the congregation. And I think this is so interesting, but you have to think, of course, your average member of a congregation at this time would not know how to read, and they wouldn't even speak or understand Latin. They would speak Gaelic. So I'd say that your average book would not have a lot of power over someone who was illiterate and spoke a different language. So therefore you make this book that's so beautiful that it would have inspired anyone illiterate or not, just with all of its colors and all of its symmetry and lots of illustration. Because the monks knew the biblical texts in and out, they filled these copies with meaning using things other than words. So instead they use the symbolism of animals like lions and snakes and peacocks to represent say, the resurrection. The host is depicted in the mouths of mice or lions. There's a cross motif on almost every page, m angels bearing the stigmata pointing at Christ. There are a lot of intricate and really often humorous, definitelys that make it really cool to look at. You should definitely go online and find a bunch of pictures. And I feel like this is a follow along podcast. You can pull up images and reference them. Maybe not when you're driving if you're a commuter listener. So going down into book specifics, the pages are big, like ten by thirteen inches, and there are three hundred forty folio six eight pages and they're written on calf bellum. Probably we're missing about sixty pages, although one page was recovered in the eighteenth century and flipped back into the book, which I think is so awesome. Um the vellum represents about a hundred and eighty five skins of calves um, so you can imagine just the work and effort that would go into creating the parchment. And it's that texture of the parchment that no facimile can reproduce, even if it's really a great coffee, because it's thick and leathery in certain spots, and then it's really been almost to the point of translucence and in others. And going from pages to script, the letters that make up the gospels, the prefaces, the summaries of the gospel narratives are written in this insular's type of writing that's typical of Scotland, Ireland and Linda's barn at the time, and it was essentially a Newish type of font and the variations of it spread throughout Europe by missionaries. But of course the script doesn't mean anything in the Book of Kells without the illumination. Yeah, it surrounds all of the text and there are only two pages in that whole long thing devoid of ornamentation, which I think is so amazing. They don't picture book, supposed picture book. They embellished keywords and key phrases and decorated initials, their drawings that wrap around the text. It's all perfectly put together to like a puzzle, which is so interesting when you think about multiple people working on one page. There's not work inspired by Celtic metal working and stone crosses and people lay through the words. You really have to look this up. But people just with their legs all folded up in funny Celtic knots and they're tongue tied in bows and it's it's really interesting, and like we've mentioned before, the imagination and humor in these drawings. It's not just stay in religious types of things. The letters seem alive. There are human figures that are fantastically elongated in part and pulling each other's beards. Um. A horse rider is pointing an important part of the text with his toes, one of my favorite parts. It's like, look at this, I'm kicking towards it. There's an inebriated, illustrated man who's sinking against the edge of the page. And there are tons of animals to lizards and cats and lions, moms, otters, fish, mice, hens, lizards, hounds, and it's funny too some of the animals. Obviously, the monks wouldn't have seen these these um you know, monks on iona kills wherever they are um never would have seen a lion, for example, and they must have known kind of how a lion's body was shaped and that it hit a main But consequently they end up looking like dogs with these big funny whiskers. But the animals are used to to indicate things, corrections and additions and a turn in the path which is kind of a change in the direction of the text. So they have roles. And there is feature art as well, complex scenes that take up whole pages, like the arrest of Christ at the Temptation of Christ Virgin and child St. Matthew St. John. But perhaps the most famous is the Cairo, and that gets us to the illuminators, the people who illustrated the book. Uh. The historian fran Sis Henry thinks that there are three principal artists. One is the Goldsmith, and he's probably the most famous. Here. Of course, we don't know who these people really are and what their names would have been, um. But the Goldsmith is considered the great draftsman, and he didn't draw foliage, but he really liked yellow and blue, and he probably illustrated that famous Cairo page and earned his nickname. And if you've ever seen the Cairo this will makes sense to um. He earned his nickname because he's really good at creating the effect of gold filigree on vellum with this yellow color, which was actually Arsenic based. So we can only guess about the goldsmith's health later in life, but a really impressive work. And then we've got the portrait painter who created images of Christ, the four Evangelists, and maybe the simple page in the St. Matthew Gospel. And the third is the illustrator who really like to bright colors and may have been responsible for the Temptation of Christ, the arrest of Christ, and the Virgin and Child image. The Virgin and Child I'd say it is one of the most striking images in the book too. Um. But it's also believed that there were four scribes, and they don't get names that are quite as good as the as the illuminators here, but they're called just A, B, C, and D. And because their hands are so similar, I mean, it's hard for an untrained I like my own to even tell them apart, but they were probably together and work together in the same script. Toorrium, hand A uses this typical brown gall ink. Hand B is this black ink, which I had no idea. It was a novelty at the time and probably signified some kind of Mediterranean contact. It's weird to think that black ink wouldn't be your standard. And hand C is responsible for lots of the book, according to scholars, and Handy had a large, confident script that's a little easier to tell, which you would have to have some confidence to to to write this stuff. You had to write quickly on vellum um to keep a nice flow to this script. And we've talked about how open and clear this kind of writing is. If you if you understood Latin, you'd probably be able to read it um. It's not that cramped, difficult style of writing that you would maybe expect from the period. And contemporary calligraphers have messed around with the style of writing and figured out that a page of script without the decorations, you know, just the writing might have taken only a few hours. The decoration, of course, would have taken a lot longer. But it's interesting to think of how fast you could make a book of tells, but I still think of writing for a few hours on one page. How if you made a mistake, it would just be I think I would be devastated. I would not be a good scribe. But there aren't many corrections, or at least there are many corrections that are are noted. And instead of just scribbling something out or like what I would probably do, try to turn it into the right letter, they just superscript the new letter above the incorrect one and mark out the old one with a dot in the center, which consequently makes it look pretty good. So how did they make this book? If you know there aren't a ton of corrections and everything. How did it work? We'll talk a little bit about the actual writing process. Scribes used quills from feathers of swans or geese, and you can actually get a pretty good idea of what the scribe at work might look like. Um, when you see the image of John the evangelist, who's depicted with his quill hard at work on the Gospel. And the makers of the book like to remind their readers what they were reading, and I would think remind them of of the monk's own role in Mega Yeah, because I mean, after all, copying Um, copying the Bible like this is an act of devotion in itself, and so books appear in the manuscript more than thirty times. Angels hold them, evangelists Jesus um just sort of reminding people of that whole larger connection. The painting was done with fine brushes, probably made from the fur of the pine martin, which is a weasily type of animal and kind of cute too. It is super cute. We google image did lapis Lazily was the most expensive pigment used. The only known source for it in the ninth century was one mine in the Ebotic Shawn area of Afghanistan, so it consequently it cost a fortune. Traders auld charge whatever they wanted for it, and other imported pigments from the Mediterranean include the maroon colors and purple, and there's um. White and red are often derived from white lead or red lead, another kind of toxic pigment to be working with. Red could also come from a pregnant Mediterranean insect, the Kermacoccus vermino, which I just wonder how people discover stuff like this. If you step on a bug and you notice some nice red looking ink come out of it. You don't have to go through that much trouble at the office. You could get your green from a vertigree a copper acetate, but this didn't do as well um over time, since it corrodes the vellum when it stamp. Because I think sometimes you have to mix it with you. It might have to be prepared with vinegar um. But the artists also used tools. They had rulers and set squares and compasses. Sometimes you can even see the very very faint trace lines from the compasses and these templates. And but some of the illuminations are so small, and there are these intense geometric designs that have lines that are less than half a millimeter apart. You wonder how they did this even with tools. How is it possible? Well, that's why we have Cornell because Cornell paleontologist John Sisney believes, according to Cornell News, that the Celtic monks and this is a quote from him, trained their eyes to cross above the plane of the manuscript so they could visually superimpose side by side elements of a replicated pattern and thereby create three D images that magnified differences between the patterns up to thirty times. So basically it let them replicate designs across the page and then also gives some vision that's capable of this submillimeter precision before you have something like microscopes. I think this is so crazy. If you cross your eyes and practice enough. We've been crossing our eyes at each other there all day. No, I have not gotten this amazing vision yet. Um. But he called this free fusion stereo comparison, and it's not something that the Celtic monks would have shared freely because it kind of gave them a leg up in the illumination world. Um. But you can tell because of some clues. One thing is that the element spacing is usually about the distance between an average person's pupils. They probably made the templates by drawing a design repeatedly cutting out airs as they kept on doing it until they finally have one that's ready. And you can tell this too, because sometimes you'll see a minor mistake that's repeated throughout the pattern, throughout the rows and columns, suggesting that you know they did work from a template. Since such precision and time can't be replicated today, it's good that we have some really nice copies eximile He's made in the eight is involved the invention of its own special camera. Since the book couldn't leave Trinity, couldn't be unbound, and couldn't be touched by anyone or anything. Yeah, they had to invent this camera that had a light section to press down the pages so that they were flat enough to photograph. And this copying specximily can re recreate or recapture every wash of paint in every little beetle hole, basically everything except the texture of the vellum. It's so fantastic, and it's so fantastic that Kel's still wants the original of this book. The city made a push for one of the manuscripts to return to them and two thousand and take up a spot in a heritage exhibit that they've set up um, but the heritage center had to close because of issues with a leaky roof, So the city's making another push for a manuscript in the wake of the Secret of Kell's, an animated film which was nominated for an Oscar and of course appropriately hand drawn, which Sarah and I really haven't heard before. The really want to see it. We also want our own book of Kels, but that brings us today to our listener mail. So, keeping with our story about the Book of Kells and about great Irish folk tales and fairy tales, we have a correction or a comment from Allison about our episode on the Real blue Beard, and she wanted to mention that it was Beauty and the Beast was not written by Charles Perrol but actually Madame de villinove Um, And yeah, we wanted to make that clear in case it wasn't. We We didn't actually think that Charles Perraul wrote the book, right, We just but we would like to clarify and because that wasn't clear to everyone else here but Alison it is. I agree with you. The Beauty and the Beast history is a really fun one and we're really into fairy tales in general. So if there's something you'd like to hear about specifically, please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We'd also like to remind you that we have a Twitter and you can follow us and learn that all the interesting stuff we're learning about at missed in History, and you should check out our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out this stuff you missed in history class, flogged on the how stuff works dot com home page

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy, and today we're going to talk about what might be the most beautiful book in the world, the Book of Cows. Yeah, when my mom was in her teens traveling in Dublin, she made sure to visit the Book of Kells as often as she could because back then they used to change the pages over every day or so and you could see a new illumination in new text. And now they only turn the pages of the manuscripts every few months. But when I visited Dublin a little more than a year ago, I made sure to check in with the Book of Kells and um, it's probably the most famous book in the world, maybe the most beautiful, and it's kept at Trinity College, which is right in the middle of Dublin. After taking a look at the famous campus arch, you can take a turn in the college library and there's a whole exhibit devoted to the book. Before getting a glimpse at its pages, the museum impresses upon its visitors the whole significance of this volume. You know what the Book of Kells means and why it's so important, its age, the skill and time it took to make it, the scholarship surrounding it, and the miracle of it even surviving. And finally you get to this packed room where two of the four manuscripts are displayed, and four manuscripts make up the whole. We don't want to give the impression they are different copies, um, but each manuscript represents a gospel, and one has turned to an illuminated page and one to a page of script, and the writing is really shapely and clear, and the illumination is colorful and detailed, and so detailed in fact, that you never could get quite a close enough view and long enough of you and that big crowd of people to to see everything. But it's still amazing to look at something that's so intricate and so beautiful and more than one thousand, two hundred years old old. So no wonder it's often considered Ireland's National treasure and attracts five hundred thousand visitors a year. So let's dive into the history of the book. Yeah, so the Book of Kells isn't just famous for its beauty, and its skill of craftsmanship. It's shrouded in mystery and there are all these misadventures. It's so amazing that we actually still have this book and it's in as good a shape as it is. So for centuries there has been arguments about where it originated, whether it was Ireland or Northern England or Scotland, but the most likely story starts way back in five sixty one or maybe five sixty three. So in five sixty one or five sixty three, the Irish Saint Columba or column Kill which means delve of the Church, who was an Irish monk inscribe, fled Ireland and founded a monastery on Iona, An Island off the west coast of Scotland, and this became a missionary center to people of Irish descent who were living in the area. Yeah, so they were there for a while, but in eight oh six a Viking raid on the island left sixty eight months dead. So the Columbian monks take off. They're not going to risk that happening again, and they moved to a new monastery at Kells in County Meath, which is northwest of Dublin. And the book was probably written close to eight hundred a d. But we can't quite guess if it was written completely at Iona, completely at Kel's or a mixture of both, because you know, after all, a book is pretty portable. You could bring it when you were fleeing to your new monastery. There's some other lesser accepted hypotheses, like one that says it was written in North England, maybe Linda's Farn, the site of perhaps the second most famous illustrated manuscript of the period, Um brought to Iona and then Kells, or maybe right to Kells. Or it was possibly made at an East Scottish monaster. The controversy, but we're going to go with that. Iona to Kell's story. I think, Um, life at Kells isn't easy, are the beautiful manuscript either though? It's the city is constantly being sacked by Danes and locals, lots of Irish infighting. Um, So it's really impressive that it survives this period too, let alone it's it's earlier days we know for sure of its presence and Kells by ten oh six or ten oh seven, and Kati and I were saying, it's so strange thing ten of going one thousands UM and that's when the Annals of Ulster told that quote the Great Gospel of column Kill, the chief relic of the Western world, was wickedly stolen during the night on account of its rot shrine. Two months and twenty days later it was found under assad, missing its gold and jewel encrusted shrine and a few pages. But things still don't look up for the Book of Kells. Its existence is not easy in even the coming centuries, and it's defaced and damaged. And in the twelfth century charters concerning monastery business are copied onto its blank pages, which sounds so weird. Using the Book of Kells's scrap paper essentially horrifying. I'd don't even dog your library book. It's a common practice at the time, though, um you know when paper or vellum is rare. And also in the twelfth century, the monks lost the book. Due to ecclesiastical reform, the monastery at Kell's ceased to exist and the property passed on to the Bishopric of Meath, so the book stayed in what was now the parish church. So it stayed in the same spot. It just was no longer under the monk's protection right, And in sixteen fifty four the Cromwellian cavalry quartered in the church and this was bad news. Um. I'm sure that the people responsible for the book are concerned that the English will run off with it, so they send it to Dublin for safety. And after sixteen sixty one it's officially presented to try the College by Henry Jones, who goes on to become the Bishop of me after restoration, and that's its home now. It has not gotten back to Kell's and we'll talk about that more later. The last terrifying book crime we have to account was not at the hands of the Vikings or the English, but in eighteen twenty one book binder who cut off about half an inch at the outer margins of the book, including decorations, sorts of priceless decoration, and that's just gone. I mean you could imagine I'm sweeping it away. I'm still angry. It's pretty tragic. It's rebound in by a more responsible binder. Um. It's getting kind of messed up after this binding though. The pages that are displayed frequently are having pigment damage and it's just getting soiled because it's touched so much. And our final binding we're going to mention is in nineteen fifty three when it's repaired and rebound by Roger Powell, who was a leading conservation book binder, and he puts it into the four volumes that we know today, which correspond to a Gospel. And um, there we go. So let's talk about the book itself. The Book of Kells is comprised of four Gospels in Latin based on a Vulgate text. The Vulgate edition was written by St. Jerome in a d and that is what ultimately became the definitive Latin version of the Bible. Yeah, and the English versions that we know are based in turn off of the Vulgate. It's interesting though this isn't necessarily um about the Book of Kells, but a lot of the illuminated manuscripts at the time are not pure Vulgate. Um. Many Irish trained monks knew earlier translations of the Gospels and knew them, had had them memorized, and they trusted their memories more than the model that they were given to coffee. So there's sort of like freeform Gospels, like transformation of the Bible. The book was made at the height of Ireland's Golden Age, and it represented an enormous commitment at the monastery's time and resources. We've got a lot of gold involved, a lot of expensive pigments, and lots of monks. There's just lots of manpower, a really time intensive book. You cannot get the Book of Kells on your kindle. And we have to also ask what is it for. It's an oversized book, heavily ornamented. I mean that cover originally was gold with jewels all over it. So it's not made for a private devotional. It's not what you retreat to your cell with and look over. It's probably something that would have been carried in ceremonial processions like Easter, for example, and then placed on an altar facing out toward the congregation. And I think this is so interesting, but you have to think, of course, your average member of a congregation at this time would not know how to read, and they wouldn't even speak or understand Latin. They would speak Gaelic. So I'd say that your average book would not have a lot of power over someone who was illiterate and spoke a different language. So therefore you make this book that's so beautiful that it would have inspired anyone illiterate or not, just with all of its colors and all of its symmetry and lots of illustration. Because the monks knew the biblical texts in and out, they filled these copies with meaning using things other than words. So instead they use the symbolism of animals like lions and snakes and peacocks to represent say, the resurrection. The host is depicted in the mouths of mice or lions. There's a cross motif on almost every page, m angels bearing the stigmata pointing at Christ. There are a lot of intricate and really often humorous, definitelys that make it really cool to look at. You should definitely go online and find a bunch of pictures. And I feel like this is a follow along podcast. You can pull up images and reference them. Maybe not when you're driving if you're a commuter listener. So going down into book specifics, the pages are big, like ten by thirteen inches, and there are three hundred forty folio six eight pages and they're written on calf bellum. Probably we're missing about sixty pages, although one page was recovered in the eighteenth century and flipped back into the book, which I think is so awesome. Um the vellum represents about a hundred and eighty five skins of calves um, so you can imagine just the work and effort that would go into creating the parchment. And it's that texture of the parchment that no facimile can reproduce, even if it's really a great coffee, because it's thick and leathery in certain spots, and then it's really been almost to the point of translucence and in others. And going from pages to script, the letters that make up the gospels, the prefaces, the summaries of the gospel narratives are written in this insular's type of writing that's typical of Scotland, Ireland and Linda's barn at the time, and it was essentially a Newish type of font and the variations of it spread throughout Europe by missionaries. But of course the script doesn't mean anything in the Book of Kells without the illumination. Yeah, it surrounds all of the text and there are only two pages in that whole long thing devoid of ornamentation, which I think is so amazing. They don't picture book, supposed picture book. They embellished keywords and key phrases and decorated initials, their drawings that wrap around the text. It's all perfectly put together to like a puzzle, which is so interesting when you think about multiple people working on one page. There's not work inspired by Celtic metal working and stone crosses and people lay through the words. You really have to look this up. But people just with their legs all folded up in funny Celtic knots and they're tongue tied in bows and it's it's really interesting, and like we've mentioned before, the imagination and humor in these drawings. It's not just stay in religious types of things. The letters seem alive. There are human figures that are fantastically elongated in part and pulling each other's beards. Um. A horse rider is pointing an important part of the text with his toes, one of my favorite parts. It's like, look at this, I'm kicking towards it. There's an inebriated, illustrated man who's sinking against the edge of the page. And there are tons of animals to lizards and cats and lions, moms, otters, fish, mice, hens, lizards, hounds, and it's funny too some of the animals. Obviously, the monks wouldn't have seen these these um you know, monks on iona kills wherever they are um never would have seen a lion, for example, and they must have known kind of how a lion's body was shaped and that it hit a main But consequently they end up looking like dogs with these big funny whiskers. But the animals are used to to indicate things, corrections and additions and a turn in the path which is kind of a change in the direction of the text. So they have roles. And there is feature art as well, complex scenes that take up whole pages, like the arrest of Christ at the Temptation of Christ Virgin and child St. Matthew St. John. But perhaps the most famous is the Cairo, and that gets us to the illuminators, the people who illustrated the book. Uh. The historian fran Sis Henry thinks that there are three principal artists. One is the Goldsmith, and he's probably the most famous. Here. Of course, we don't know who these people really are and what their names would have been, um. But the Goldsmith is considered the great draftsman, and he didn't draw foliage, but he really liked yellow and blue, and he probably illustrated that famous Cairo page and earned his nickname. And if you've ever seen the Cairo this will makes sense to um. He earned his nickname because he's really good at creating the effect of gold filigree on vellum with this yellow color, which was actually Arsenic based. So we can only guess about the goldsmith's health later in life, but a really impressive work. And then we've got the portrait painter who created images of Christ, the four Evangelists, and maybe the simple page in the St. Matthew Gospel. And the third is the illustrator who really like to bright colors and may have been responsible for the Temptation of Christ, the arrest of Christ, and the Virgin and Child image. The Virgin and Child I'd say it is one of the most striking images in the book too. Um. But it's also believed that there were four scribes, and they don't get names that are quite as good as the as the illuminators here, but they're called just A, B, C, and D. And because their hands are so similar, I mean, it's hard for an untrained I like my own to even tell them apart, but they were probably together and work together in the same script. Toorrium, hand A uses this typical brown gall ink. Hand B is this black ink, which I had no idea. It was a novelty at the time and probably signified some kind of Mediterranean contact. It's weird to think that black ink wouldn't be your standard. And hand C is responsible for lots of the book, according to scholars, and Handy had a large, confident script that's a little easier to tell, which you would have to have some confidence to to to write this stuff. You had to write quickly on vellum um to keep a nice flow to this script. And we've talked about how open and clear this kind of writing is. If you if you understood Latin, you'd probably be able to read it um. It's not that cramped, difficult style of writing that you would maybe expect from the period. And contemporary calligraphers have messed around with the style of writing and figured out that a page of script without the decorations, you know, just the writing might have taken only a few hours. The decoration, of course, would have taken a lot longer. But it's interesting to think of how fast you could make a book of tells, but I still think of writing for a few hours on one page. How if you made a mistake, it would just be I think I would be devastated. I would not be a good scribe. But there aren't many corrections, or at least there are many corrections that are are noted. And instead of just scribbling something out or like what I would probably do, try to turn it into the right letter, they just superscript the new letter above the incorrect one and mark out the old one with a dot in the center, which consequently makes it look pretty good. So how did they make this book? If you know there aren't a ton of corrections and everything. How did it work? We'll talk a little bit about the actual writing process. Scribes used quills from feathers of swans or geese, and you can actually get a pretty good idea of what the scribe at work might look like. Um, when you see the image of John the evangelist, who's depicted with his quill hard at work on the Gospel. And the makers of the book like to remind their readers what they were reading, and I would think remind them of of the monk's own role in Mega Yeah, because I mean, after all, copying Um, copying the Bible like this is an act of devotion in itself, and so books appear in the manuscript more than thirty times. Angels hold them, evangelists Jesus um just sort of reminding people of that whole larger connection. The painting was done with fine brushes, probably made from the fur of the pine martin, which is a weasily type of animal and kind of cute too. It is super cute. We google image did lapis Lazily was the most expensive pigment used. The only known source for it in the ninth century was one mine in the Ebotic Shawn area of Afghanistan, so it consequently it cost a fortune. Traders auld charge whatever they wanted for it, and other imported pigments from the Mediterranean include the maroon colors and purple, and there's um. White and red are often derived from white lead or red lead, another kind of toxic pigment to be working with. Red could also come from a pregnant Mediterranean insect, the Kermacoccus vermino, which I just wonder how people discover stuff like this. If you step on a bug and you notice some nice red looking ink come out of it. You don't have to go through that much trouble at the office. You could get your green from a vertigree a copper acetate, but this didn't do as well um over time, since it corrodes the vellum when it stamp. Because I think sometimes you have to mix it with you. It might have to be prepared with vinegar um. But the artists also used tools. They had rulers and set squares and compasses. Sometimes you can even see the very very faint trace lines from the compasses and these templates. And but some of the illuminations are so small, and there are these intense geometric designs that have lines that are less than half a millimeter apart. You wonder how they did this even with tools. How is it possible? Well, that's why we have Cornell because Cornell paleontologist John Sisney believes, according to Cornell News, that the Celtic monks and this is a quote from him, trained their eyes to cross above the plane of the manuscript so they could visually superimpose side by side elements of a replicated pattern and thereby create three D images that magnified differences between the patterns up to thirty times. So basically it let them replicate designs across the page and then also gives some vision that's capable of this submillimeter precision before you have something like microscopes. I think this is so crazy. If you cross your eyes and practice enough. We've been crossing our eyes at each other there all day. No, I have not gotten this amazing vision yet. Um. But he called this free fusion stereo comparison, and it's not something that the Celtic monks would have shared freely because it kind of gave them a leg up in the illumination world. Um. But you can tell because of some clues. One thing is that the element spacing is usually about the distance between an average person's pupils. They probably made the templates by drawing a design repeatedly cutting out airs as they kept on doing it until they finally have one that's ready. And you can tell this too, because sometimes you'll see a minor mistake that's repeated throughout the pattern, throughout the rows and columns, suggesting that you know they did work from a template. Since such precision and time can't be replicated today, it's good that we have some really nice copies eximile He's made in the eight is involved the invention of its own special camera. Since the book couldn't leave Trinity, couldn't be unbound, and couldn't be touched by anyone or anything. Yeah, they had to invent this camera that had a light section to press down the pages so that they were flat enough to photograph. And this copying specximily can re recreate or recapture every wash of paint in every little beetle hole, basically everything except the texture of the vellum. It's so fantastic, and it's so fantastic that Kel's still wants the original of this book. The city made a push for one of the manuscripts to return to them and two thousand and take up a spot in a heritage exhibit that they've set up um, but the heritage center had to close because of issues with a leaky roof, So the city's making another push for a manuscript in the wake of the Secret of Kell's, an animated film which was nominated for an Oscar and of course appropriately hand drawn, which Sarah and I really haven't heard before. The really want to see it. We also want our own book of Kels, but that brings us today to our listener mail. So, keeping with our story about the Book of Kells and about great Irish folk tales and fairy tales, we have a correction or a comment from Allison about our episode on the Real blue Beard, and she wanted to mention that it was Beauty and the Beast was not written by Charles Perrol but actually Madame de villinove Um, And yeah, we wanted to make that clear in case it wasn't. We We didn't actually think that Charles Perraul wrote the book, right, We just but we would like to clarify and because that wasn't clear to everyone else here but Alison it is. I agree with you. The Beauty and the Beast history is a really fun one and we're really into fairy tales in general. So if there's something you'd like to hear about specifically, please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. 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