British Library Cotton ms Nero D IV, the Lindisfarne Gospels, is a well-travelled manuscript. Created at Lindisfarne in the later seventh and early eighth century, it accompanied the Community of St Cuthbert from Lindisfarne to Chester-le-Street in the later ninth century and then to Durham in the late tenth century. After the dissolution of Durham Cathedral priory in 1539 it entered the library of Sir Robert Cotton (d 1631) and then the core collections in the British Museum and the British Library. Like many well-travelled manuscripts it is a palimpsest, worked on by four named individuals: Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, its scribe and illuminator; Bishop Æthilwald of Lindisfarne, its binder; Billfrith the anchorite, its case- or cover-maker; and Aldred, priest of Chester-le-Street, its glossator. Thus it presents an opportunity to engage popular interest through our obsession with individual physical and spiritual journeys.

Cotton ms Nero D IV returned to Durham for the exhibition ‘Lindisfarne Gospels Durham: one amazing book, one incredible journey’ in 2013. Professor Richard Gameson’s study was written to accompany this exhibition. This has shaped his approach in a number of positive ways. Firstly, with an uninitiated audience in mind, he provides in Chapter 1 a survey of how we know what we know about the manuscript and an introduction to its contents. Secondly, following the exhibition, he structures his study through the parallel themes of place and person. Chapter 2 concerns Lindisfarne and the work of Eadfrith in the late seventh and early eighth century. Gameson reviews the historical circumstances that concentrated an unusual range of textual and visual models at Lindisfarne, but emphasises that Eadfrith was making conscious choices in the exemplars he selected to combine Roman, Irish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. As bishop of a community that had faced upheavals as a result of disputes over Roman and Irish liturgical practices, Eadfrith’s work may be seen as an act of spiritual devotion, a projection of his own spiritual authority and a political statement about the compatibility of such traditions. Chapter 3 concentrates on Chester-le-Street and the work of Aldred. Gameson shows that Aldred was pursuing a wider programme of glossing Latin texts in Old English, translating individual words, but not whole phrases. Aldred’s work may be envisaged as an act of personal devotion, an aid to meditation on the Latin text, and an effort to reform clerical education. Aldred may have been an outsider seeking to secure his position within the Community of St Cuthbert. A third influence from the exhibition is the focus on Cotton ms Nero D IV in the context of other surviving manuscripts and the inclusion of eighty-four lavish illustrations to accompany the text. For the exhibition, Cotton ms Nero D IV was set alongside other illuminated manuscripts, including the St Cuthbert Gospels and the Durham Gospels. Within Chapters 4, on Durham, and 5, on the later history of the manuscript, effective use is made of other manuscripts to place the treatment of it in the context of wider practice at Durham and to assess its wider significance within a European perspective. The publishers have included extremely high-quality images of a number of the manuscripts to which reference is made. What particularly sets apart the images of Cotton ms Nero D IV is the fact that the publishers were given access to the manuscript itself in order to match up as closely as possible the colouring in the original with the printed images. Ultimately, Cotton ms Nero D IV emerges as exceptional in its own right, but also as an exceptional survivor whose preservation depended on curation from the eleventh century to the formation of the British Museum in 1753 and the British Library in 1973.

Yet Professor Gameson has done more than produce an exhibition volume: it should be purchased, not only by the uninitiated and those seeking lavish illustrations of the texts, but also for its up-to-date, judicious summaries of the enormous field of scholarship and for its persuasive independent judgements. To give but four examples: Gameson explains the facts and hypotheses for the date of writing and illumination and plumps for a period stretching from the 690s to c 710; he argues that it was originally created, not for St Cuthbert or the translation of his relics, but for the community, only gradually becoming associated with Cuthbert; he does so by summarising recent arguments that an earlier Old English poem underlies Aldred’s colophon on the production of the manuscript; and he makes the original point that the manuscript with its nineteenth-century cover weighs the equivalent of three adult cats. None the less, his study should be read in conjunction with other works to get a rounded picture. Michelle Brown’s much longer book (Brown Reference Brown2003) gives more attention to the decorative programmes, their spiritual purpose and meaning and the potential function(s) of the manuscript. Moreover, given its utility to scholars, students and the uninitiated as well as its useful endnotes locating the arguments within the wider scholarship, an opportunity has been missed to make the study completely accessible to those readers. If there is a second edition, some additional apparatus would help – a glossary, a short bibliography, an index and perhaps extended captions or highlights on some of the illustrations to identify particular features.