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Book of Kells Conference

Kells banner image June 2015 croppedThe Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC) is delighted to open the booking for the forthcoming conference to be held at Trinity College Dublin on 10-11 September 2015.

THE BOOK OF KELLS: RETHINKING AND RESEARCHING A GREAT NATIONAL TREASURE

This conference will focus on the Book of Kells, the world’s most famous medieval manuscript, with presentations on recent research trends and techniques, and on the challenges faced in displaying great manuscript treasures.

Rachel Moss, ‘Celtic Tiger Tales: Recent Developments in Insular Art Research’
Bernard Meehan, ‘Researching the Book of Kells’
Denis Casey, ‘Cows, cumala and Kells: the medieval Irish economy and the production of a masterpiece’
Heather Pulliam, ‘Material Matters: The Role of Colour in the Book of Kells’
Susie Bioletti, ‘Pinning down the pigments and techniques on the Book of Kells’
Christina Duffy, ‘How to improve medieval manuscripts using colour space analysis and other techniques’
Michael Brennan, ‘Taking apart a page in the Book of Kells: the eight-circle cross’
John Gillis, ‘The Faddan More Psalter: conservation, research and display’
Sally McInnes, ‘New access to Welsh national treasures’
Claire Breay, ‘Celebrating an 800-year-old document: the case of Magna Carta’
Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Declaration of Arbroath and its display’
Peter Yeoman, ‘Prowling lions and slippery serpents: re-presenting Columba’s Iona to the world’

In addition to these speakers, announced previously, Tomm Moore has agreed to talk on the subject of ‘Bringing the Book of Kells to Hollywood’. Tomm is co-founder and creative director of Cartoon Saloon, Kilkenny. His feature film The Secret of Kells (Best Animated Feature Nominee: Academy Awards ®, 2010) has been followed by The Song of the Sea, again an Oscar nominee in 2014.

Sessions will run from 10:30-17:00 on Thursday 10th September and from 09:30-16:00 on Friday 11th September. On Thursday evening there will be a special after-hours visit to the National Museum of Ireland and a reception at TCD Library including a private visit to the Book of Kells. On Friday afternoon there will be a private visit to the Worth Library. The detailed programme will be published shortly.

The cost of the conference is £50 (€60) for members and students and £60 (€75) for non-members which includes Thursday lunch, teas and coffees, and the reception.

This is sure to be a popular conference and places are limited. To book, please complete the online form on the AMARC website.

Limited bursaries are available from AMARC for students who are – or would like to become – members, covering travel by the most reasonable means of transport. Bursary application forms are available from the treasurer via email (m.m.n.stansfield@durham.ac.uk).

If you have any questions about the conference, please contact: Dr Suzanne Paul (sp510@cam.ac.uk).

Bernard Meehan

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Designing ‘The Secret of Kells’

IMG_9697Designing the Secret of Kells, by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, with a foreword by Charles Solomon (Trinquétte Publishing, 2014)

For historians and curators, the imaginative recreation of the past presents particular, but frequently unacknowledged, difficulties. The skills needed to establish chronologies, or to tease out the causation behind historical events, or to make academic judgements about works of art, are quite different from those needed to convince an audience of the reality of the past. For this, works like Michael Crichton’s Timeline, or the movie of The Name of the Rose, allow us to glimpse a remote physical and intellectual past.IMG_9707 In the animated film The Secret of Kells, nominated for an Oscar award in 2009, the atmosphere of Ireland’s medieval monasteries and their famous artistic output is captured brilliantly by Cartoon Saloon of Kilkenny. Dwelling on the turbulence of the times, the film reveals a monastic world which is both open to visitors from abroad yet at risk from outside forces. In its inspired artistic asides, it mirrors the extraordinary qualities of the Book of Kells itself and seems to follow in a technical line from the work of the stained-glass artist Harry Clarke. When snow falls on the monastery, individual flakes take the form of crosses drawn in a myriad of designs. Such scenes call for repeated viewings and live long in the memory.IMG_9706 cropped

IMG_9704 croppedIn this new publication, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart of Cartoon Saloon explain how they did it, and, of equal interest, they say who did what. We learn that Ross Stewart designed the scriptorium at Iona, that Tomm Moore devised the individual characters in the scriptorium, one of them a tribute to the actor Mick Lally, who played Brother Aidan and died in 2010, shortly after the release of the film, and that Adrien Merigeau was responsible for a different realisation of the scriptorium. Many a scholar of the Book of Kells would wish for such a guide.IMG_9712

 

Bernard Meehan

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Scotland the Brave: Manuscripts from Scotland

TCD MS 226 f4r
TCD MS 226 f4r

As Scotland makes an historic decision today, this is a good opportunity to highlight some of the sources for the study of Scottish history within the M&ARL collections.

TCD MS 498 p320
TCD MS 498 p320

Displayed here is a page of a fifteenth-century copy of the earliest attempt to write a continuous history of Scotland: John de Fordun’s Scotichronicon (TCD MS 498). Fordun wrote his history in response to the removal and destruction of many national records by the English King Edward III, grandson of the infamous ‘Hammer of the Scots’, Edward I. The page shown features an account of the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297, when the forces of William Wallace and Andrew de Moray defeated the combined English forces of John de Warenne, 7th earl of Surrey, and Hugh de Cressynghame, near Stirling on the river Forth.

 

TCD MS 1289 p313
TCD MS 1289 p313

Also in the M&ARL collection are two copies of the Senchus fer n-Alban, (TCD MS 1289 and 1298), a genealogical text originating from the oral tradition and codified in later manuscripts. The Senchus provides both a mythical and historical record of the ‘history of the men of Scotland’ from their Dal Riata origins and, in a description of an encounter in 719 AD, includes the earliest reference to a naval battle off British shores.

 

TCD MS 226 f3r
TCD MS 226 f3r

TCD MS 226 is a beautiful twelfth-century religious manuscript of the sermons of St Augustine and other texts originating from Kelso Abbey in the Scottish Borders. The text is heavily decorated and as such is a rare survival among Scottish medieval manuscripts.

 

TCD MS 7574
TCD MS 7574

The M&ARL collection also contains what might be termed as ‘Jacobite relics’, including the elaborate marriage certificate of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s parents, ‘The Old Pretender’, James III to Maria Clementina Sobieski in 1719 (TCD MS 7574). There is also an early manuscript copy of Robert Burns’ poem ‘Address to the Deil [devil]’ (TCD MS 10664 p 95) contained in a volume of poems by William Young, curate of Magheraculmoney, Co Fermanagh, 1720-c1757.

M&ARL holds nineteenth-century tour journals of trips to Scotland and political papers including those of James Connolly (TCD MS 11074) executed in 1916. Connolly was born in Edinburgh and had links to the Scottish socialist movement. M&ARL also holds the papers of Michael Davitt (TCD MS 9535), who became involved in the Crofters’ war of the 1880s and toured Scotland in 1882.

Of course the most famous manuscript with a Scottish link is the Book of Kells, which may have been produced, in part, on Iona, off the coast of Scotland, by Irish monks in the ninth century.

Estelle Gittins