Gospels (Brittany(?), late 9th/early 10th century)

MS 194

This inconspicuous little volume of the four Gospels is St John’s oldest
handwritten book

The most remarkable feature of this manuscript is the unfinished full-page illustration on the first folio: One of the four Evangelists is sitting underneath a canopy with a pen in his hand, turning the page of his Gospel while an angel with a cross-staff is leaning towards him (fol. 1v). The illustration is believed to have been added around 1000 at Christ Church, Canterbury. The Evangelist has variously been identified as John (Hanna, p. 281) and Matthew (Wormald, no. 52). The latter identification has likely been made because this drawing is a copy of an illustration of the Evangelist Matthew in a late 9th-century Book of the Gospels, now British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.ii (Wormald, no. 52). The
Tiberius codex had been given to Christ Church, Canterbury, by King Athelstan (d. 939). Because the illustration in St John’s manuscript is believed to have been added at Christ Church, both, the Tiberius Gospels and the Brittany Gospels, must have arrived there in the course of the 10th century. The identification as the Evangelist John in the Brittany Gospels has likely been based on the writing in the illustration’s Gospel. As in the Tiberius codex, the writing recounts the beginning of the Evangelist’s Gospel, but here the words spell out the beginning of the Gospel of John. Considering that the script used in the illustration is late rather than early medieval, this appears to be a later addition to the drawing.

The manuscript features two further later additions. The first is a 13th-century copy of a charter from 979, in which King Æthelred II (966-1016), today better-known as Æthelred the Unready, granted land at Sandwich and Eastry (Kent) to Christ Church, Canterbury. Even later than that, probably from the 15th century, is the drawing of the robed king squeezed between the gutter and the Latin charter. As the figure gestures to the word ego ‘I’ in the charter, it may have meant to depict this notorious 10th-century king, whose unhappy hand in the conflict with Viking invaders bestowed him the epithet unræd ‘ill-advised’, a pun on the meaning of his name, Æthelred ‘well-advised’.

Further Resources
Full digitization available at Digital Bodleian
Descriptive catalogue record available at Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries
Extended blog post on our designated Special Collections website