The Book of Cerne (Cambridge University library, MSLLL10) reveals a complex interplay of text, script, and image. It offers a fascinating insight into Insular culture and is the only surviving illuminated manuscript that can be firmly attributed to the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. At the time of its production, around 820-840, princes and prelates were vying for power and the Vikings were knocking, less than politely, at the door.

The Book of Cerne is a prayerbook (meditating upon the themes of salvation and the communion of saints) made for a patron...

The eighth-century Latin Gospelbook known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, with its tenth-century gloss (the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language), is one of the great landmarks of human cultural achievement. Like all such icons, or important archaeological sites, it repays revisiting. Successive generations approach them with new questions and new technologies, bringing to light fresh evidence or finding different ways of 'reading' what we thought we knew already. This study seeks to do just that, taking advantage of new photography and technical analysis as...