In 2007, the organic purple was identified as orcein through the use of a fluorometer, measuring luminescence lifetime decay. However, the blue, which had previously been identified as the mineral Lapis Lazuli, only available from Afghanistan in the medieval period, turned out to be the locally available dye plant woad. There were all the usual suspects for a medieval manuscript, including red from lead tetroxide, green from a copper-based verdigris and yellow orpiment from arsenic sulphide. It gave an almost complete list of ingredients, some of which contradicted earlier analysis. But there has been a wealth of research and new discoveries over recent years that now make it possible to identify most of the material components and go into detail on some of the craft processes involved.Īt Trinity College Dublin between 20, micro-Raman spectroscopy was used to analyse the book’s pigments. There is no other object of comparable complexity, no existing craft process that matches the detail, not even a lexicon for many of the toolmarks and processes that can be identified. We don’t know when it was made, where, or even how. Unanswered questionsĪ thousand years’ worth of historical sources for an artefact would normally be a gift for any archaeologist, but in the case of Kells, basic questions still aren’t answered. It was transferred to Dublin for safety, and under the direction of the Bishop of Meath Henry Jones, a leading figure in Cromwell’s army, the Catholic relic was presented to Trinity College, where it remains today. The Book remained at Kells into the 17th century, by which time the powerful Columban abbey had become a near derelict parish church, badly damaged in the 1641 Irish rebellion. Reconstruction of Book of Kells John portrait It had been stolen from the church at Kells and was missing for ‘two months and twenty nights’ according to the annals of Ulster, which goes on to describe the manuscript as ‘the most precious object of the western world’. Its first appearance in the historic record and only known period of absence from Irish society occurred in 1007, by which time it was already an ancient artefact. The Book of Kells is perhaps the world’s most famous relic, in Ireland it has been handed down through the generations as a venerated artefact for almost a millennium without interruption.
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