ABSTRACT
Harmonious integration of text and decoration is one of the outstanding features of the Book of Kells. Malcolm Parkes and Patrick McGurk have shown how scribes and book artists used decoration to divide and articulate text in the Insular tradition. At first glance, the Book of Kells seems to differ in its presentation of text from contemporary luxury gospel manuscripts. Its pages, with their hierarchies of decorated letters and paragraph-like block sections, contrast with those of the Macregol or Rushworth Gospels, which was probably made at Bin, County Offaly, in the early ninth century. The block text format is typical of manuscripts associated with seventh- and eighth-century Irish production. Graphic and decorative articulation of the archaic division at Matthew 26: 31 is found also in manuscripts of Old Latin and mixed Vulgate texts from the Continent. The Lindisfarne Gospels abandoned the division, while simultaneously referring to specifically Insular visual forms.
