Paul Meyvaert - Bede, Cassiodorus, and The Codex Amiatinus

Bede, Cassiodorus,
and the Codex Amiatinus

By Paul Meyvaert
For Julian Brown, in memoriam
One of the natural shortcomings to which historians are prone is a failure to give
ignorance its due, and to acknowledge the force of the haphazard in human affairs.
We know that Bede was eager for knowledge and industrious in acquiring it. With
respect to Cassiodorus, however, he labored under difficulties we have been slow
to perceive. Before his eyes in his monastery at Jarrow lay an imposing volume
that had taken shape under Cassiodorus's direction at Vivarium in southern Italy,
but neither he nor his brethren, including their abbot Ceolfrith, who had bought
the book in Rome, knew what it was that they possessed. For years they saw it
only as a splendid old volume where all the books of the Bible had been assembled
together between two covers, in a text they recognized as predating Jerome's Vulgate. Bede had been a young boy when he accompanied Ceolfrith to Jarrow from
Wearmouth; he grew to maturity in the presence of this volume, Cassiodorus's
Codex Grandior,and his increasing acquaintance with it is reflected in his writings.
Eventually its connection with Cassiodorus was recognized, although imperfectly.
Over the years Bede's respect for Cassiodorus grew and deepened, but his knowledge remained limited to the end. The extent of that limitation and the understanding achieved despite it are examined in the following pages.1
1. THE INSTITUTIONES, A WORK OF CASSIODORUS UNKNOWN TO BEDE
A passage in Bede's commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah expresses his great

respect for Cassiodorus. To understand this, we must remember that Bede never
claimed to be an original writer, especially in matters relating to Christian teaching. Numerous passages, strewn throughout his works, show that he considered
his task to be one of transmitting to his own generation the accumulated learning
found in the writings of the church fathers.2 They were the authorities to whom
he appealed, the men of true wisdom whose teaching he sought to convey to
1 In the notes that follow, CCSL = Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout, 1953-); CLCLT
= Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts on CD-ROM (Turnhout, 1991); PL = J.-P. Migne, ed.,
Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina (Paris, 1844-55); and SC = Sources chretiennes (Paris,
1941-).
2 See especially Bede's
prefaces to his commentaries on Genesis (CCSL 118A), the Canticle of Canticles (CCSL 119B), the Gospels of Luke and Mark (CCSL 120), the Acts of the Apostles (CCSL 121);
also the prefaces to his De Templo (CCSL 119A) and the Thirty Questions on Kings (CCSL 119). He
rejoices in viewing himself as patrum uestigia sequens. In Homeliae Evangelii 2.11 (CCSL 122, p. 258,
11.191-92) he says, "Sed quia donante domino lectionem sancti euangelii patrum uestigia sequentes
exponendo transcurrimus."
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Speculum71 (1996)
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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus
others. Cassiodorus shared a similar outlook; recognizing this, Bede rejoiced, and
his veneration for the Roman senator grew. His allegorical interpretation of Ezra
6.8, which describes the taking of tribute from the king's chest for the building of
the Temple, equates the Temple with the Church, Ecclesia, and interprets the verse
as pertaining to those who build-that is, who educate and unite the church's
members-by drawing on treasures found in the king's chest, namely, the works
of great church fathers who lived in former times:
Sed danturpresbiteris,hoc est senioribusIudaeorum,in sumptusoperistemplidumhis
qui in Christiconfessionepraecesseruntmagistriserudiendiatque ecclesiaemembris
adunandicommittuntur.
Qualisfuit Cassiodorusquondamsenatorrepenteecclesiaedoctor qui dum in expositionepsalmorumquamegregiamfecit diligenterintuitusest quid
AmbrosiusquidHilariusquidAugustinusquidCyrillusquidIohannesquidceterifratres
dixerintedoctumse proculdubio a senioribusIudaeorum,id est confitentiumet laudantium Deum, probauit.3
Although Cassiodorus often appeals to one or another church father, there is a
particular passage in the conclusion to his comments on Psalm 2 that Bede seems
to have in mind here, although he is probably recalling the passage from memory:
Hoc paterAthanasiusAlexandrinus,hoc HilariusPictauiensis,hoc AmbrosiusMediolanensis,hoc Augustinuset Hieronymus,hoc Cyrillus,hoc alii multipatresad tollendam
quoquefunditusoccasioneminanissimaequaestionis.Hoc papaLeo cum sanctasynodo
Chalcedonensi decreuit atque constituit....4
The attractive portrait of Cassiodorus drawn by Bede lacks, however, one important component. Can we conceive that Bede would have praised the Roman
senator for following the teaching of the Fathers, without ever mentioning his
efforts to foster the monastic ideal at Vivarium, had he been aware of that aspect
of Cassiodorus's career? If Bede is totally silent about Cassiodorus's contribution
to monasticism, it would seem that he cannot have been familiar with Cassiodorus's Institutiones. A few scholars have held that Bede did know the Institutiones,
but those who have studied him most closely deny this claim. Pierre Courcelle
believed he could detect parallels between Cassiodorus's comments on Genesis in
the Institutiones and Bede's preface to his own commentary on Genesis, but a
close comparison of these texts fails to reveal any verbal dependency-we are
dealing with a simple case of overlap: Cassiodorus lists the patristic works on
Genesis at his disposal, and Bede does the same.s Bede's commentary on Genesis,
moreover, shows that he knew and used the works he lists in his preface, so there
is no need to assume that Cassiodorus's list, rather than the works themselves,
served as Bede's source. Paul Lehmann, who explored Bede's works while preparing his Cassiodorstudien, concluded that his knowledge of Cassiodorus derived
Bede, In Ezram et Neemiam 2 (CCSL 119A, p. 295, 11.280-89).

Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum 2 (CCSL 97, p. 50, 11.396-401).
5 Pierre Courcelle, Les lettres grecques en occident de Macrobe a Cassiodore (Paris, 1948), pp. 375-
76 andp. 375, n. 1.
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entirely from the commentary on the Psalms.6 M. L. W. Laistner did not include
the Institutiones in his list of the books in Bede's library because he could find no
evidence that Bede knew it.7 Carlotta Dionisotti hunted for evidence while preparing her study "On Bede, Grammar, and Greek" and ended by lamenting, "it
was a mean trick of fate to deprive Bede of Cassiodorus's Institutes, in which he
would have found so many of his interests warmly and sympathetically treated."8
Not a shred of evidence indicates that Bede ever encountered the Institutiones,
and a number of circumstances demonstrate that he did not. We can begin with
Bede's failure to mention Cassiodorus in the long chronicle that forms chapter 66
of his De temporum ratione; he knew the name but had no way of knowing when
Cassiodorus had lived and therefore could not place him in the chronicle.9 He
may have wondered about the Pater apostolicus being addressed in the preface to
the Psalm commentary, but there was nothing there to tell him that this was Pope
Vigilius (537-55), whom Cassiodorus had known in Constantinople.10 In the
preface to his Institutiones Cassiodorus mentions his very close connection to one
of Vigilius's predecessors, Pope Agapetus (535-36). Once in possession of this
name, Bede would had had no problem situating Cassiodorus in his proper time
since he possessed a copy of the Liber pontificalis and was also familiar with the
Dialogues of Gregory the Great, where Agapetus is mentioned in connection with
the emperor Justinian.1lWe can conclude that Bede did not know the Institutiones.
Further evidence emerges from his scriptural commentaries, where Bede likes
to note which patristic works he knew and used. Although Cassiodorus indicates
in his Institutiones that Ambrose of Milan-one of Bede's favorite authors-gave
an allegorical exposition of parts of the Canticle of Canticles in book 2 of his
Patriarcharum,12Bede fails to mention or use this work of Ambrose in his own
allegorical commentary on the Canticle.13In the prologue to his commentary on
Ezra Bede is silent about the homilies on Ezra by Origen, which Cassiodorus's
friend Bellator had translated into Latin.14Again, Cassiodorus states that he had
caused fifty-five homilies on the Acts of the Apostles by John of Constantinople
6 Paul
Lehmann, Cassiodorstudien, in Erforschung des Mittelalters, 2 (Stuttgart, 1959), p. 85: "Beda
ist der erste, der Cassiodor namhaft macht und ihn als Kirchenlehrerpreist. Jedoch scheint sich seine
Kenntnis auf das Erklarungswerk der Psalmem zu beschranken."
7 M. L. W. Laistner, "The Library of the Venerable Bede," in Bede, His Life, Times and Writings,
ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford, 1935), p. 264, includes only the commentary on the Psalms and
the Historia tripartita under Cassiodorus.
8 Carlotta Dionisotti,"On Bede, Grammar, and Greek," Revue benedictine 92 (1982), 129.
9 The
opening words of the Psalm commentary must have led Bede to associate Cassiodorus with
Ravenna: "Repulsis aliquando in Rauennati urbe sollicitudinibus dignitatum et curis saecularibus
noxio sapore conditis, cum psalterii caelestis animarum mella gustassem . ." (CCSL 97, p. 3, 11.1-
3).
10 See Andre van de Vyver, "Cassiodore et son ceuvre," Speculum 6 (1931), 244-92,
at p. 254.
1See Dialogues 3.3 (SC 260, p. 268): "Post non multum uero temporis, exigente causa Gothorum,
uir quoque beatissimus Agapitus, huius sanctae Romanae ecclesiae pontifex, cui Deo dispensante deseruio, ad Iustinianum principem accessit."
12 Institutiones 1.6.4
(ed. R. A. B. Mynors [Oxford, 1937], p. 24). Nor does Bede refer to the other
works on the Canticle listed in this section.
13
Bede, In Cantica Canticorum (CCSL 119B, pp. 167-375).
14
Institutiones 1.6.6 (ed. Mynors, p. 27).
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(Chrysostom) to be translated into Latin,15but the only work on Acts to which

Bede can refer in his preface to his commentary on Acts is the long poem by
Arator.16Similarly,in the preface to his commentary on the Catholic Epistles, Bede
is silent about the works on these Epistles by Clement of Alexandria, Didymus
the Blind, and Augustine (on the letter of James), which Cassiodorus lists in his
Institutiones.17 More striking still is Bede's failure to mention Augustine's De
diuersis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum in his preface and commentary on 1 Samuel, since Cassiodorus had singled out the particular verses of 1 Samuel for which
this work of Augustine was helpful.18The same can be said about other pointers
that Cassiodorus provides regarding Latin patristic works, for example, on Proverbs and Tobit: Bede fails to follow these indications in his own commentaries on
these books of Scripture.19
Browsing through Bede and recalling Cassiodorus, one encounters one topic
after another on which Cassiodorus gives information that Bede would surely have
repeated in one form or another had he known the Institutiones. One such topic
of particular interest to Bede was that of the mendosus codex: when is it legitimate
to correct a scriptural manuscript suspected of containing faulty readings?20Cassiodorus has a very long chapter on this very topic, entitled "Sub qua cautela relegi
debeat caelestis auctoritas," where he discusses the many aspects of the question.
There is not a hint that Bede had ever seen this chapter,which would have provided
the guidance he longed for.21In all these cases (and this applies especially to one
instance to be treated later),22Bede's failure to use the Institutiones becomes strong
positive proof that he had never encountered this work. The Institutiones of Cassiodorus was not present in the monastic libraries of Monkwearmouth or Jarrow.23
We will need to keep this fact constantly in mind as we proceed; it will force us
to examine certain questions with renewed caution. Any study that makes the
Institutiones the basis of its arguments in dealing with Bede or the products of his
scriptorium, like the Codex Amiatinus, is basically flawed if it cannot at the same
15
Institutiones 1.9.1 (ed. Mynors, p. 33).

See Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, "Praefatio" (CCSL 121, p. 3).
17
Institutiones 1.8.4-6 (ed. Mynors, pp. 29-30). For Bede's prologue to the Catholic Epistles see
CCSL 121, pp. 181-82.
18 Institutiones 1.2.2 (ed.
Mynors, p. 16). For Bede's commentary on 1 Samuel see CCSL 119.
19For Proverbs see Institutiones 1.5.1-2, and for Tobit Institutiones 1.6.4. For Bede'scommentaries
on these books of Scripture see CCSL 119B.
20
On this topic see P. Meyvaert, "Bede the Scholar,"in Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration
of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976),
pp. 47-51.
21 Institutiones 1.15
(ed. Mynors, pp. 41-51).
16
22
See below at n. 44.
23
Bonifatius Fischer, "Codex Amiatinus und Cassiodor," in Lateinische Bibelhandschriften im friihen

Mittelalter (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1985), p. 22, n. 3, points to a verbal similarity between the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith ("ex Hebreo et Greco fonte transfusus") and Institutiones 1.12.2 ("de Hebreo
fonte transfuderet"). This, however, is insufficient evidence to prove a direct connection. According to
the CLCLT,Bede three times uses similar expressions ("ex Hebreo fonte transfusi," "ex Hebraeo fonte
transfusa," "de Hebraeo fonte transfusis") in parallel with Isidore's Etymologies ("ex Hebraeo in Latinum eloquium easdem Scripturas conuertit, eloquenterque transfudit") and Gregory the Great's Moralia ("ex Hebraeo ... eloquio cuncta uerius transfudisse perhibetur,""in Latina lingua transfusum").
Use of transfundere to indicate a translation would naturally suggest source (fons).
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time provide indubitable proof that this work was circulating in Northumbria in
Bede's day.24
2. WORKS OF CASSIODORUSKNOWN TO BEDE
Which works of Cassiodorus did Bede know? He certainly knew the commentary on the Psalms (Expositio Psalmorum), in its longer version.25An abbreviated
version of this commentary circulated in Northumbria close to Bede's time. There
is reason to think, however, that this abbreviated version slightly postdates Bede,
and that the full version of the Psalm commentary was the only one he knew or
used.26Bede did have a copy of the Latin version of the Antiquities of Josephus,
commissioned by Cassiodorus, but since the senator's name was lacking in the
title of the work (and since he lacked the Institutiones) he cannot have been aware
of the connection.27It would certainly have interested him, since he made extensive
use of the Antiquities and held the Jewish historian in high esteem: "reuoluamus
scripta Iosephi quo doctior de talibus post diuina eloquia nemo facile repperitur."28
As regards Cassiodorus's Tripartite History, thought by Laistner to be the source
of a tradition Bede records about John the Baptist's burial and later exhumation,29
his actual source for this story is now known to have been the Historia ecclesiastica
of Eusebius in the version of Rufinus. Bede's many references to the Historia ecclesiastica, in fact, all turn out to be references to Rufinus'swork. Wilhelm Levison
24 Otto-Karl Werckmeister made much use of the

Institutiones in his Irisch-northumbrische Buchmalerei des 8. Jahrhunderts und monastische Spiritualitit (Berlin, 1967), relying entirely on Courcelle's
study cited above (see n. 5) as proof that Bede had known this work. See my review of this work in
Speculum 46 (1971), 408-11. I much regret to find myself in basic disagreement with the article by
Karen Corsano, "The First Quire of the Codex Amiatinus and the Institutiones of Cassiodorus,"
Scriptorium 41 (1987), 3-34, which is built on the premise that the Codex Grandior never reached
Northumbria and that everything is to be explained on the basis of the Institutiones. I use the word
"regret" designedly here, since despite my disagreement with many of its conclusions, I have found
this to be a most stimulating article, often helping me to open up some new avenue of enquiry, and
constantly, through its challenging statements, forcing me to examine an "accepted" position more
critically. Where I do fully agree with Corsano is in her statement that the Codex Amiatinus cannot
be accepted a priori as a faithful replica of the Cassiodoran model on which it relied, for her the
Institutiones, for me the Codex Grandior. One must remain continuously alert concerning possible
alterations made at Wearmouth-Jarrow to the model being followed.
25 See Richard N.
Bailey, "Bede's Text of Cassiodorus's Commentary on the Psalms," Journal of
Theological Studies, n.s. 34 (1983), 189-93.
26 This was the conclusion Richard N.
Bailey reached in his Jarrow Lecture of 1978: see The Durham
Cassiodorus (Jarrow, Eng., 1978).
27 Cassiodorus, Institutiones 1.17.1: "hunc tamen ab amicis nostris, quoniam est subtilis nimis et
multiplex, magno labore in libris viginti duobus converti fecimus in Latinum" (ed. Mynors, p. 55). See
the introduction of Franz Blatt to his critical edition, The Latin Josephus (Copenhagen, 1958), pp.
25-94, where all the manuscripts are listed and analyzed. None carries the name of Cassiodorus in
its title. As regards Bede's use of the Antiquities see Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-JosephusTradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden, 1972), pp. 107-9.
28
Bede, In 1 Samuelem 2 (CCSL 119, p. 69, 11.45-47).
29
See "The Library of the Venerable Bede," p. 245 and n. 1, giving a reference to Bede'scommentary
on Mark (PL 92:190D). This corresponds to CCSL 120, where the correct reference to Rufinus is given
on p. 509, 11.811-25.
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therefore rightly concluded that Cassiodorus's Historia tripartita remained unknown to Bede.30The same must be said about Cassiodorus's De orthographia,
another work of which Bede would have made abundant use had he known it.
Lehmann has shown that the Cassiodoran elements in Bede's didactic works all
derive from the senator's commentary on the Psalms.31This was unquestionably
the work of Cassiodorus with which Bede was most familiar.32
Bede makes two other explicit references to Cassiodorus, but they concern not
written works but images (picturae). It is essential to approach these references
within a chronological framework. We know from Cassiodorus's Institutiones and
his commentary on the Psalms that he had caused images of the Tabernacle and
Temple to be painted and inserted at the beginning of his Codex Grandior.33
Through Bede we know that Ceolfrith-at the time still prior of the Wearmouth
community-accompanied Benedict Biscop, the founder of Wearmouth, on the
latter's fifth journey to Rome in 679-80.34 While in Rome Ceolfrith acquired a
Latin pandect containing the uetus translatio of the Bible, which he brought back
with him to Northumbria.3s It would seem that there was a considerable lapse of
time before the Wearmouth community came to realize that this manuscript had
formerly belonged to Cassiodorus. Evidence for this can be found in Bede's Thirty
Questions on the Books of Kings, written for his friend the London priest Nothelm; this work has received little attention and has never been fully studied. It
probably dates from c. 715, a decade earlier than the date assigned to it by Laistner.36We know that Bede had completed three of the four books of his commen30
W. Levison, "Bede as Historian," in Bede, ed. Thompson, p. 133.

Lehmann, Cassiodorstudien, pp. 86-88.
32 Caution is needed when
using C. W. Jones's editions of Bede's didactic works in CCSL (123A123C). The editor was prone to giving an overabundance of references, which on closer scrutiny often
fail to show real dependence. There is unquestionably an overlap among many of the grammatical
works: the problem then becomes one of discerning which source was really being used. Of the twentyfive references Jones gives to Cassiodorus's De orthographia in his index (CCSL 123C, pp. 725-26),
not a single one demonstrates that Bede was using this work rather than one of the other parallel
treatises. In the one instance where Cassiodorus figures alone among the sources he is obviously not
the source Bede was using (CCSL 123A, p. 13: Bede has "Baluae, id est thyrae, per 'b' incipiant."
Cassiodorus has "Baluae id est ianuae"). For further criticism of Jones's CCSL editions see the article
of C. Dionisotti cited above in n. 8 (esp. pp. 111-12, 134).
33 See below at n. 41.
34
Concerning the date of this journey see Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (London, 1960),
p. 168: "We do not know when the travellers set out, but we do know that when they reached Rome
the papacy was occupied by Agatho who was elected only in the summer of 678, and we know also
that they were back in England by 679 or early in 680."
35 On this see below at n. 48. For the Lateran as a
possible source from which this Bible came see
Courcelle, Les lettres grecques en occident, pp. 373-74. If the Lateran was the main source for all the
books acquired in Rome and brought back to Northumbria, it is surprising that Bede does not tell us
this, since he likes to underline benefactions that derived from the papacy. There were probably many
sources in Rome from which manuscripts could be obtained for a good price, and we know that
Benedict Biscop was wealthy.
36 In
Regum Librum XXX quaestiones was edited by David Hurst in CCSL 119, pp. 289-322, who
repeats (p. v) the date of 725 given by M. L. W. Laistner in A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1943), p. 62. Laistner's conclusion was not based on a thorough study of the work. The Thirty
Questions dates from around 714-15 and belongs to the period when Bede was composing books 1
through 3 of his commentary on 1 Samuel; I discuss the question of the date in "The Date of Bede's
Thirty Questions on Kings to Nothelm" (to appear in 1997).
31
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tary on 1 Samuel by early June of 716, when Ceolfrith suddenly announced that
he was leaving Northumbria to end his days in Rome.37This would suggest that
the commentary was begun about 714. It can be shown that the Thirty Questions
on Kings was composed after Bede had finished book 1 but before he had completed book 3 of the commentary. A date of 715, therefore, seems likely for the
replies to Nothelm. In the eighteenth reply he deals with some verses of chapter
11 of 4 Kings having to do with events that occurred in Solomon's Temple.38
Whenever he touches on matters concerning the Temple, we become aware that
Bede seems to have an extraordinarily lucid picture in his mind of the whole
topography of the Temple complex. Here he proceeds to give Nothelm a detailed
description of the Temple layout, but realizing that he cannot point to a particular
text of Scripture that might provide this detailed knowledge he makes the following comment:
Quorumomniumin libro paralipomenonita generalisfit mentio, "DeditautemDauid
Salomonifilio suo descriptionemporticuset templiet cellariorumet caenaculiet cubiculorumin aditiset domuspropitiationisnec non et omniumquaecogitaueratatriorum
et exedrarumper circuitumin thesaurosdomus domini in thesaurissanctorum,"sed
Iosephi scripturauel pictura ab antiquisformata plenius quo sint haec ordine facta
distinguit.39
Bede is therefore appealing here both to the writings of Josephus and to a pictura
ab antiquis formata as his main sources for information on this matter, without
making it completely clear which elements of the description he owed to Josephus
and which to the pictura ab antiquis formata. Nor does he tell us where this pictura
was to be found.
When he next returned to this topic, in his treatise on the Temple of Solomonfind an important change. The same informadating from around 729-31-we
tion about the Temple layout is given, but now it is linked, not to an anonymous
pictura ab antiquis formata, but directly to Cassiodorus:
Has uero porticusCassiodorusSenatorin picturatempliquamin pandecteposuit ut
ipse in psalmorumexpositionecommemorattripliciordinedistinxit.... Haec ut in pictura Cassiodoridistinctarepperimusbreuiteradnotarecurauimusrati eum ab antiquis
haec Iudaeisdidicissenequeuirumtam eruditumuoluissein exemplumlegendiproponere quae non ipse priusueraesse cognouisset.40
What had happened in the interval, close to fifteen years, between the Thirty
Questions on Kings and the treatise De Templo? In his continuing exploration of
Cassiodorus's commentary on the Psalms, Bede must have come upon a brief
remark on Psalm 86:
37 See Bede's
opening comments in book 4 of his commentary: CCSL 119, p. 212. Bede had been
linked to Ceolfrith since his boyhood days, and his abbot's sudden departure for Rome in 716 deeply
upset him. It took him a while to recover and resume work on book 4 of the commentary.
38 CCSL 119, pp. 311-13.
39
Ibid., p. 312, 11.52-59. Here and throughout this article I have italicized key phrases in quoted
matter.
40
De Templo 2 (CCSL 119A, pp. 192-93,11. 28-30, 48-52).
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Nos enim et tabernaculum,quod eius imago primitusfuit, et templumipsumfecimus

pingi et in pandectenostrocorporegrandioreelegimusconlocare;quatenusquod scripturaediuinaede ipsis textus eloquitur,oculis redditumclariuspanderetur.41
The lapse of time is not to be wondered at. Which of us knows the full contents
of all the books on our study shelves? Our acquaintance with these volumes is
usually a gradual process. For Bede, moreover, there were special difficulties. He
belonged to a community of twin monasteries, each with its own library. The
distance between them is six or seven miles as the crow flies, but ease of travel
would have been somewhat dependent on the season, and the books Bede wanted
to consult may not always have been immediately at hand.
In his commentary on Psalm 14, where the word tabernaculum occurs, Cassiodorus had likewise inserted an allusion to the image of the Tabernacle he had
placed in the Codex Grandior.42Although at this juncture he does not specifically
mention the image of the Temple, his statement that his image was inserted at the
beginning of the pandect ("quod nos fecimus pingi et in Pandectis maioris capite
collocari") would have been sufficient to alert Bede or one of his brethren to this
indication of the former ownership of their pandect. One can also suspect that if
the reference to Psalm 14 was the first to be encountered, it would have provided
a spur to further exploration of this work of Cassiodorus, in search of similar
information.
Bede's eventual identification of the pictura ab antiquis formata with the image
Cassiodorus placed in his pandect tells us where this image was located, namely,
in the pandect with the uetus translatio that Ceolfrith had brought back from
Rome; we know from Cassiodorus himself that the Codex Grandior was the one
that contained the uetus translatio.43It is important to note that Bede mentions
only Cassiodorus's commentary on the Psalms as the source of his information.44
Had he known the Institutiones, where Cassiodorus again speaks of inserting
41 Cassiodorus,ExpositioPsalmorum86 (CCSL98, pp. 789-90, 11.40-44); I incorporate

herethe
correctionsto the text proposedby JamesH. Halporn,"Pandectes,Pandecta,and the Cassiodorian
Commentaryon the Psalms,"Revuebenedictine90 (1980), 290-300. In his Institutiones(1.5.2) Cascommonuitetiamtabernaculum
siodoruswrote,"[Eusebius]
templumqueDominiad instarcaelifuisse
formatum;quae depictasubtiliterlineamentispropriisin pandecteLatinocorporisgrandioriscompetenteraptaui"(ed. Mynors,p. 23). The wordingof this passagehas sometimesbeen interpretedto
indicateonly one singleimage(of the Tabernaclecombinedwith the Temple)in the CodexGrandior.
Takenin conjunctionwith the passagein the Psalmcommentarytherecan be no doubtwhateverthat
Cassiodorusis referringto two distinctimages,both of whichwereexaminedand describedby Bede.
42 CCSL97, p. 133,11.43-45: "Dequo [Tabernaculo]
etiamet Iosephusin libroAntiquitatum
tertio,
titulo septimo, diligentinarrationedisseruit,quod nos fecimuspingi et in Pandectismaioriscapite
methodoftenledhimto addmarginalcomments
collocari."VandeVyverhasshownthatCassiodorus's
to workspreviouslycomposed.The Psalmcommentarydatesfrombeforethe foundationof Vivarium
andthe makingof thepandects,andthisnotationgiveseveryappearanceof beingsucha lateraddition:
see "Cassiodoreet son ceuvre,"pp. 272-80; see also, by the same author,"LesInstitutionesde Cassiodoreet sa fondationa Vivarium,"Revuebenedictine53 (1941), 59-88, at pp. 59-76.
43Institutiones1.14.2 (ed. Mynors,p. 40): "Tertiavero divisio [secundumLXX] est interalias in
codicegrandiore... conscripto...."
44The articleon the date of Bede'sThirtyQuestionson Kingsto Nothelm (see n. 36, above)will
show that two stagesin Bede'suse of Cassiodorus'sPsalmcommentaryneedto be distinguished.
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835
images both of the Tabernacle and the Temple into his Codex Grandior, he would
certainly have mentioned this source. And he would undoubtedly also have mentioned the role played by the blind Eusebius, whose visit to Vivarium and eloquent
discourse had caused the senator to have the two images prepared.45
While the images of the Tabernacle and Temple helped to identify the former
owner of Wearmouth-Jarrow's ancient pandect, we must be careful not to read
too much into this finding. The danger for the modern historian, aware of all the
sources and here, in particular, of the information given in the Institutiones, will
be to draw more from the evidence than it warrants. Without the Institutiones at
their disposal Bede and his community could not have known that Cassiodorus
himself had been responsible for producing the Codex Grandior.Indeed Bede must
have concluded, from the manner in which Cassiodorus phrased his two statements in the Psalm commentary, that the senator had simply inserted these images
into a large Bible already in his possession;46the fact that he mentions the insertion
of only two images would have reinforced this impression. Bede, whose knowledge
of Cassiodorus seems to have been completely confined to what he could draw
from the Psalm commentary, had no reason to hold the Roman senator responsible
for other images or diagrams found in the Codex Grandior.He and his community
knew from a simple comparison of the text with the manuscripts of Jerome's
Vulgate that its text was that of the uetus translatio, predating Jerome, and this
naturally led them to view their manuscript as one of great antiquity (ab antiquis
formata). It is from this perspective that we must imagine Bede and his brethren
examining the contents of their ancient pandect-with great reverence, interest,
care, and continuing puzzlement.
3. THE CODEX GRANDIOR,MODEL FOR CEOLFRITH'SNEW PANDECTS
Were the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith our only source, we would never have
known that it was he who acquired the pandect in Rome, but only that he had
caused three new pandects to be made:
45 Institutiones 1.5.2 (ed. Mynors, pp. 22-23). According to Cassiodorus this blind Eusebius came
"de partibus Asiae ... ad nos." The very sparse details relating to his discourse on the Tabernacle and
Temple must be noted: "commonuit etiam tabernaculum templumque Domini ad instar caeli fuisse
formatum. ..." The dates for Eusebius's visit must fall between the foundation of Vivarium (c. 540)
and the completion of the Institutiones (post-551). It is around this very same period (c. 547) that the
Alexandrian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes was composing his Christian Topography,whose central
thesis concerned the Old Testament Tabernacle viewed as a model of the universe (z6ino zov
instar caeli! The drawings of the Tabernacle found in Cosmas's work will be referred
oipavov)-ad
to below. His theological speculations are connected with Mar Aba and the school of Nisibis. It is
tempting to link the theories of the blind Eusebius (de partibus Asiae) with this same school, especially
since Cassiodorus opens his introduction to the Institutiones with a word of praise for the flourishing
school of Nisibis. For dates concerning Cassiodorus, see the two articles by Andre van de Vyver cited
above, nn. 10 and 42. On Cosmas Indicopleustes and his background see Wanda Wolska, La "Topographie chretienne" de Cosmas Indicopleustes (Paris, 1962) and, as Wanda Wolska-Conus, her threevolume edition (with a long introduction) of the Topographie chretienne (SC 141, 159, 197).
46See the text
quoted above at n. 41.
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836
Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus
... bibliothecam,quamde Romauel ipse [Ceolfridus],uel Benedictusadtulerat,nobiliter

ampliauit,ita ut inter alia tres Pandectesfaceretdescribi,quorumduo per totidemsua
monasteriaposuitin aecclesiis,ut cunctisqui aliquodcapitulumde utrolibetTestamento
legereuoluissent,in promtuesset inuenirequod cuperent;tertiumautemRomamprofecturusdonumbeato Petroapostolorumprincipiofferredecreuit.47
Bibliotheca here simply means "library,"as it does in Bede's text quoted next; it
does not have the special connotation of "Bible" acquired in some regions. Bede,
on the other hand, was intent in his Historia abbatum on linking all four pandects
with the name of his abbot:
... bibliothecamutriusquemonasterii,quamBenedictusabbasmagnacaepitinstantia,
ipse [Ceolfridus]non minori geminauitindustria;ita ut tres pandectesnouae translationis, ad unumuetustaetranslationisquemde Roma adtulerat,ipse superadiungeret;
quorumunumsenex Romamredienssecuminteralia pro muneresumpsit,duos utrique
monasterio reliquit....48
Bede, therefore, is our only source for confirming that it was Ceolfrith, not
Benedict Biscop, who acquired the pandect with the uetus translatio in Rome and
brought it back to Northumbria. When he accompanied Biscop in 679-80, Ceolfrith was prior of Wearmouth. Not long after returning home, Biscop appointed
him abbot over the small group, including the young Bede, sent north from Wearmouth to establish their new monastic foundation at Jarrow, on the southern bank
of the river Tyne.49Bede's narrative implies a certain possessiveness on Ceolfrith's
part toward his pandects, and we must assume that on moving to Jarrow Ceolfrith
took his Roman pandect with him. The Wearmouth-Jarrow communities were
familiar with the story of abba Gelasios placing a complete Bible in the church
"so that any of the brethren who wished to read it could do so."S When the new
church of Jarrow was consecrated on 23 April 685, we can therefore imagine
Ceolfrith's pandect finding a place of honor in the new building.s1 Bede lived in
immediate proximity to this manuscript, and this no doubt explains his great
familiarity with its images of the Tabernacle and Temple. In 689, a year before
his death, Biscop appointed Ceolfrith to be abbot of both communities, Wearmouth and Jarrow. It was no doubt this new double responsibility that led Ceolfrith to conceive the plan of endowing each of his monastic churches with a new
pandect containing the preferred text for the Bible, namely, Jerome's noua trans-
47Historiaabbatumauctoreanonymo20 (ed. C. Plummer[Oxford,1896], p. 395). Forcommunity

use of a Bibleplacedfor thatpurposein the church,seethe Verbaseniorum(on Gelasios):"Continebat
[codex]vetus et novumTestamentumtotum;et positus erat Codex ipse in ecclesia,ut qui vellet de
fratribuslegeret"(PL73:969C).
48 Bede,Historiaabbatum15 (ed. Plummer,
pp. 379-80).
49 On the foundationof
Jarrowsee HunterBlair,The Worldof Bede,pp. 175-83.
50See n. 47 above.
51We know the date from the dedicationstone that still survives,now set in the wall above the
chancelarchof St. Paul's,Jarrow:see The Anglo-Saxons,ed. J. Campbell,et al. (Oxford,1982), p.
75. I recognizea certainweaknessin this suggestion,pointedout by one of the earlyreadersof the
article:it is morelikelythat the decisionto follow the exampleof abba Gelasiosand place a Biblein
eachof the two monasticchurchesfollowedthe productionof Ceolfrith'sfirsttwo pandects,sincethey
containedthe text of the Biblethat enjoyedthe greatestapproval,namely,Jerome'sVulgate.
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837
latio. The plan must have come to maturity while Ceolfrith watched the writing
skills of his two monastic scriptoria develop and blossom. Given the amount of
material and labor involved, the project (even if begun soon after his appointment)
must have taken many years to complete.52
Bede's account suggests that the Codex Grandior served Ceolfrith as the model
for the new pandects he produced. The idea of putting all the books of the Bible
between two covers was not entirely new, but for this Northumbrian community
the Codex Grandior was probably the first physical example they had seen. Since
they viewed it as a manuscript of great antiquity (ab antiquis formata), they must
have held it in great reverence, worthy of being imitated.53Among the changes
projected was that of replacing the uetus translatio with Jerome's noua translatio
or Vulgate text.54It was also decided to depart from the model in another respect;
the Codex Grandior was almost certainly not written per cola et commata,55but
Jerome was known to favor this presentation at least for some of the biblical
books, and this disposition of the text must have appealed to an Anglo-Saxon
community for which Latin was not the mother tongue. Apart from these differences, the Codex Grandior undoubtedly loomed large as a prototype for the new
pandects.
First, as regards size: Cassiodorus, in his Institutiones, tells us that his codex
52
On the problemof datingAmiatinusand its sisterpandectssee now the commentsof Richard
Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 98-
106. Any calculationinvolvingtime shouldtake into accountthe difficultyof writingduringthe cold

wintermonths.We know this fromthe lettersent by Cuthbert,abbot of Wearmouth,to St. Boniface
in 764: "theconditionsof the pastwinteroppressedthe islandof our raceveryhorriblywith cold and
ice and long and widespreadstormsof wind and rain, so that the hand of the scribewas hindered
from producing a great number of books": cited from English Historical Documents, 1: C.500-1042,
ed. D. Whitelock(London,1968), p. 766.

53 That the Codex Amiatinusis the work of
Englishscribesis no longer in doubt. In seekingto
determinewhichmodelsmayhavehelpedthe Wearmouth-Jarrow
scriptoriumto developits own type
of uncial,the Codex Grandiorshouldbe kept in mind. Cassiodorustells us only that it was "littera
clarioreconscripto"(Institutiones1.14, ed. Mynors,p. 40). Givenwhat we know of sixth-century
manuscriptsit seemsmorethanlikelythat its mainscriptwas uncial.SinceCeolfrithhad acquiredthe
pandectin Rome,it was probablyviewedas a Romanmanuscript,andtherefore,likeall thingsRoman,
considereda modelto be imitated.In his introductionto EnglishUncial(Oxford,1960), E. A. Lowe
failedto mentionthe possibleinfluenceof the Codex Grandioron the Wearmouthuncial.Otherswithout specificallyalludingto Vivarium-have sincepointedto some south-Italianmanuscriptsas
being closest to the main scriptof Amiatinus:see the discussionin Marsden,The Text of the Old
Testament,pp. 111-13. It is possiblethatthe CodexGrandioruseddifferentformsof scriptfor titles,
summaries,etc., and this may haveplayeda role in helpingto shapethe hierarchyof scriptsfoundin
Amiatinus.
54 In
comparingthe two passagescited above at nn. 47 and 48 we can note that Bedeis the only
one to informus explicitlythat Ceolfrith'spandectshad the noua translatio.
55I acceptvan de Vyver'sconclusionsconcerningCassiodorus'sattitudetowardthe use of cola et
commatafor presentinga text. He writes, "il est hors de doute que le codex grandiorde Vivarium
pr6sentant l'antiqua translatio n'6tait pas dispose per cola et commata" ("Cassiodore et son ceuvre,"
p. 269). Cassiodoruswas ready,butperhapsgrudgingly,to followJeromein thosecaseswhereJerome

had used cola et commatain his translationof certainbooks of the Bible.Whetherall the part-Bibles
of the noua translatiousedat Wearmouth-Jarrow
to constructthe new pandectshad cola et commata
we do not know.If they did not, Ceolfrithmusthave decidedfor reasonsof consistency(aswell as to
facilitatethe readingof the text) to applythe systemto the whole Bible.
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838
consisted of 95 quaterniones (760 folios).s6 Since the Codex Grandior's text was
not written per cola et commata, we could expect the new pandects to be somewhat longer, since more space would be needed for the same amount of text. On
the other hand, the size of the Codex Amiatinus, with its 1,030 folios in 131
gatherings, presents an enormous contrast with its prototype. We need to remember, however, that Amiatinus was the last pandect to be made, and that it was
bulkier than its two earlier sister volumes. Amiatinus, in fact, needs to be considered somewhat apart.57Ceolfrith had probably commissioned it from the first with
the intention of making it a gift volume, perhaps when he originally conceived the
plan-a plan not divulged to his community until it was put into execution-of
ending his days in Rome.s8 This helps to explain some of its features. It uses fewer
abbreviations than its sister pandects; its script is more stately and less cramped.
The fact that some leaves survive from one of the earlier pandects would seem to
provide grounds for a comparison, but Richard Marsden has recently shown that
firm conclusions in this matter are not easy to reach.59In his estimate, 1,029 leaves
in Amiatinus would correspond to about 940 in the earlier pandect. This would
result in 117 gatherings of 8 leaves, whereas Amiatinus presently has 131 quires.
Allowing for the fact that a text written per cola et commata (Amiatinus) would
need considerably more space than one not so arranged (Codex Grandior), we
come closer to the number of gatherings (95) of Cassiodorus's great pandect. It
seems legitimate to conclude that the Codex Grandior and the first two Northumbrian pandects probably resembled each other fairly closely as regards size.
What other features did the new pandects borrow from their model? From the
Institutiones we know that in addition to the images of the Tabernacle and Temple
the Codex Grandior contained illustrations of three divisions of Scripture,outlined
by Cassiodorus in chapters 12-14 of his work. Of these, the Codex Amiatinus
presents us only with an image of the Tabernacle and diagrammatic presentations
of the three divisions of Scripture. It has other elements, however, not alluded to
in the Institutiones, namely, a general preface and an image of Ezra. In the absence
of the Codex Grandior itself, our task now becomes one of determining whether
the material found in the opening pages of Amiatinus is of Cassiodoran origin,
and whether those pages present a faithful or modified version of what was bor-
56
Institutiones 1.14.2 (ed. Mynors, p. 40). Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 114 and
131, gives 380 folios, but this must be a slip since each quaternion had 4 bifolia, or 8 leaves.
57
find Marsden's analysis of the uniqueness and importance of the Codex Amiatinus fully persuasive: see especially The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 103 and 105.
58 The account Bede
gives of Ceolfrith's departure for Rome in the opening paragraph to book 4 of
his commentary on 1 Samuel shows that the abbot's decision to leave took not only Bede but his whole
community by surprise: see CCSL 119, p. 212. From the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith we know that
his brother, Cynefrith, abbot of Gilling, had acted in a somewhat similar fashion, relinquishing his
abbacy to end his days in Ireland, in the study of the Scriptures: see English Historical Documents, 1:
C.500-1042, ed. Whitelock, pp. 697-98. In Ceolfrith's case, the pull was toward Rome rather than
Ireland.
59 See, again, the excellent discussion in Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 123-29. For
a brief history of the twelve leaves presently in the British Library, see also Janet Backhouse's account
in The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, AD 600-900 (London, 1991), pp. 12223.
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839
rowed from Ceolfrith's ancient pandect, the Codex Grandior. Each feature will
deserve separate consideration.
4. THETRIPLEDIVISIONOF SCRIPTURE
Let us turn first to the three divisions of Scripture.60These are dealt with in
chapters 12 to 14 of book 1 of the Institutiones and are listed as follows in the
chapter headings, or tituli (to use Cassiodorus's own terminology), that precede
the work: (12) "Divisio Scripturaedivinae secundum sanctum Hieronymum"; (13)
"Divisio Scripturae divinae secundum sanctum Augustinum"; (14) "Divisio Scripturae divinae secundum LXX."61Cassiodorus indicates that he also placed these
divisions in his Codex Grandior.62We know from the evidence, especially of the
Bamberg manuscript, that he liked to present divisions of this kind in a schematic
form, and we can assume that he would have adopted a similar presentation for
the Codex Grandior.63The Amiatinus divisions therefore reflect what was in the
Codex Grandior, though we have no way of knowing whether or not an attempt
was made to improve the layout of the design on the page. Divergences between
the text of Amiatinus and the Institutiones need to be treated cautiously: Cassiodorus may have modified some of the wording of the Institutiones when preparing his diagrams for the pandect, or the text of the Codex Grandior may have
been modified in Northumbria when copied into Amiatinus. The naming of the
books of Scripture in each division is less important here than the short statements
contained in rectangles placed at the bottom of each page of Amiatinus.64These
statements need to be compared with the Institutiones. In the transcriptions that
follow, concerning the divisions linked to Jerome and Augustine, the text of the
Institutiones is given first:
60 All three divisions are

reproduced in J. J. G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, Sixth to the Ninth
Century (London, 1978). Fig. 27 (opposite p. 27) shows "Augustine," illus. 24 "Jerome,"illus. 25 "the
Septuaginta." For reasons that will soon become obvious I adhere throughout to this last term of
Cassiodorus, rather than to the "Hilary division" now prevalent in the literature. The same three
illustrations are also found in R. S. L. Bruce-Mitford'sJarrow Lecture of 1967, "The Art of the Codex
Amiatinus," Journal of the Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 32 (1969), illus. C (opposite p. 8)
"Septuaginta," plates IX and X "Jerome"and "Augustine."
61
Institutiones 1.12-14 (ed. Mynors, pp. 36-41).
62
This fact is acknowledged by Corsano, "The First Quire," p. 7: "In the Institutiones, Cassiodorus,
having just discussed three ways of dividing Scripture, mentions that he had all three types of divisions
attached to his larger pandect." These divisions in the Codex Grandior then fade from sight for the
rest of her article. No reason exists for refusing to consider the Codex Grandior as the vehicle that
transmitted the three divisions of Scripture to Northumbria-particularly given the absence of the
Institutiones there.
63 For the manner in which the divisions are shown in the
Bamberg codex of the Institutiones see
plates 2-4 of Corsano, "The First Quire." The Bamberg codex of the Institutiones is not the neatest
of manuscripts, and one may suspect that the diagrams were more tastefully produced in Cassiodorus's
own copy, as well as in the Codex Grandior.
64 See the illustrations listed above in n. 60. One should note how the
opening words of each division
in Amiatinus correspond exactly to what we find in the Institutiones: "Auctoritas divina" (c. 12,
Jerome), "Scriptura divina" (c. 13, Augustine), "Scriptura sancta" (c. 14, Septuaginta). The Codex
Grandior was being carefully copied here.
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Divisio Scripturae divinae secundum sanctum Hieronymum

... qui colliguntur simul quadraginta novem. cui numero adde omnipotentem et indivisibilem Trinitatem, per quam haec facta et propter quam ista praedicta sunt, et quinquagenarius numerus indubitanter efficitur, quia ad instar iobelei anni magna pietate
beneficii debita relaxat et pure paenitentium peccata dissolvit.65
[Amiatinus] Sic fiunt ueteris nouique testamenti secundum hieronymum libri quadraginta nouem quibus adde dominum christum de quo et per quem ista conscripta sunt fit
quinquagenarius numerus qui ad instar iobelei anni debita remittit et paenitentium peccata dissoluit.66
Divisio Scripturae divinae secundum sanctum Augustinum
Beatus igitur Augustinus secundum praefatos novem codices, quos sancta meditatur
Ecclesia, secundo libro de Doctrina Christiana Scripturas divinas LXXI librorum calculo
comprehendit; quibus cum sanctae Trinitatis addideris unitatem, fit totius librae competens et gloriosa perfectio.67
[Amiatinus] Sic fiunt ueteris noui que testamenti sicut pater augustinus in libris de doctrina christiana complexus est simul libri numero septuaginta uno quibus adde unitatem
diuinam per quam ista completa sunt. Fit totius librae competens et gloriosa perfectio
ipsa est enim rerum conditrix et uitalis omnium plenitudo uirtutum.68
In Amiatinus the little summary that follows the list of scriptural books begins
each time (this also holds for the third division) with the phrase Sic fiunt ueteris
nouique testamenti, and we can assume that this was Cassiodorus's doing. He was
very fond of calling Augustine pater Augustinus.69 Likewise the sentence that completes the Augustine synopsis is unquestionably his.70 Having stated that the Trinity was perfection (gloriosa perfectio), to which nothing therefore can be added,
he reinforced this with a reflection similar to one he made in his commentary on
Psalm 138: "Nam cum ad illum peruentum fuerit, non est ultra quod quaerere
debeamus: quoniam ipse ad omnia sufficit, in quo est maiestatis cuncta perfectio
et omnium plenitudo uirtutum."71
To achieve the desired numbers (fifty in the case of Jerome and seventy-two in
65 Institutiones1.12.2
(ed. Mynors,p. 37); I adopt the reading"iobelei"of manuscriptsB, G, H,
sincethis coincideswith the text of Amiatinus.
66
Quotedfrom BibliaSacra,1, ed. H. Quentin(VaticanCity,1926), p. xxiii (hereand below abbreviationshave been expanded).See n. 60 above for photographicreproductionsof this folio. The
full text of the Institutioneschaptersand of the CodexAmiatinus,placedside by side, will be found
in H. J. White,"TheCodexAmiatinusandIts Birthplace,"
in Studiabiblicaet ecclesiastica,2 (Oxford,
296-97 (Augustine).SeealsoCorsano,"TheFirst
1890), pp. 292-93 (Jerome),293-95 (Septuaginta),
Quire,"pp. 25-27; her discussionof the threediagramsfillspp. 22-30.
67 Institutiones
1.13.2 (ed. Mynors, p. 39).
68 BibliaSacra,ed.
Quentin,l:xxiv. Forthe illustrationsof this folio see n. 60 above.
69 Bedeuses
while the CLCLTshows it occurs
twenty-threetimesin
paterAugustinusonly twice,
Cassiodorus'sPsalmcommentary.As regardsthe Institutiones(not availablein the CLCLT),Mynors
notes (p. 178) in the index rerumunderpater,"usurpaturde Augustinosaepissime,de Hieronymo
quater,de Basiliosemel."It is suchpatternsof usagethathelpto throwlighton problemsof authorship.
70 Corsano,"TheFirstQuire,"p. 26, writes,"Herethe Amiatinus
tag lineis not foundin Cassiodorus
[Institutiones]and while appropriateas a commenton the DivineUnityis a non-sequiturin reference
to the number72." But the ipsa est can only referto unitasdiuina(Trinitasin the Codex Grandior)
and so must be Cassiodorus's
commenton the divineperfectio.
71
CCSL 98, p. 1241, 11.8-11.
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841
the case of Augustine), Cassiodorus proposes adding the Trinity, viewed as unity,
to forty-nine and seventy-one. In Amiatinus Christ is substituted for the Trinity
in the Jerome summary, and divina unitas replaces the explicit mention of the
Trinity in the Augustine summary. It is difficult to see what reasons Cassiodorus
himself could have had for introducing these alterations into the summaries of his
Codex Grandior. It seems more likely that someone at Wearmouth-Jarrowbecame
a little uneasy about the explicit mention of the Trinity-even though the triune
God was considered one-when only a single digit was needed to complete the
arithmetical computation! The statement in the Jerome synopsis that the whole
of Scripture was not only about Christ but had been brought into being by him,
per quem ista conscripta sunt, coincides, moreover, as we shall see, with what
Bede has to say about Ezra, representing Christ, who caused the books of the Old
and New Testament to be written (Christus . . . fecit describi) through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon the writers of these books.72 We have
some ground, therefore, for considering that the text of the Codex Grandior was
modified here. This is also the case with respect to the division according to the
Septuaginta (LXX):
Divisio ScripturaedivinaesecundumLXX
Scripturasanctasecundumantiquamtranslationemin Testamentaduo ita dividitur,
id est: ...
Tertia vero divisio est inter alias in codice grandiore littera clariore conscripto, qui
habet quaterniones nonaginta quinque, in quo septuaginta interpretum translatio veteris
Testamenti in libris quadraginta quattuor continetur; cui subiuncti sunt novi Testamenti
libri viginti sex, fiuntque simul libri septuaginta, in illo palmarum numero fortasse praesagati, quas in mansione Helim invenit populus Hebreorum.
Hic textus multorum translatione variatus, sicut in prologo Psalterii positum est, patris Hieronymi diligenti cura emendatus compositusque relictus est, ubi nos omnia tria
genera divisionum iudicavimus affigenda, ut inspecta diligenter atque tractata non impugnare sed invicem se potius exponere videantur. unde licet multi Patres, id est sanctus
Hilarius, Pictaviensis urbis antistes, et Rufinus presbyter Aquileiensis et Epiphanius episcopus Cypri et synodus Nicaena et Calchedonensis non contraria dixerint sed diversa,
omnes tamen per divisiones suas libros divinos sacramentis competentibus aptaverunt... .73
[Amiatinus, Cassiodorus's prologue, fol. IVr] ... in hoc autem corpore utrumque testamentum septuagenario numero probatur impletum, in illa palmarum quantitate forsitan praesagatus, quas in mansione helim inuenit populus hebraeorum.... 74
[Amiatinus, fol. VIIr] Sic fiunt ueteris noui que testamenti sicut diuidit sanctus hilar[i]us
romanae urbis antistes et epiphanius cyprius quem latino fecimus sermone transferri
libri. LXX. In illo palmarum numero fortasse praesagati quas in mansione helim inuenit
populus hebreorum.75
72 See
below, pp. 881-82.

Institutiones 1.14.1-3 (ed. Mynors, pp. 39-40).
74 Biblia Sacra, ed. Quentin, l:xxi-xxii.
73
75
Ibid.,p. xxiv. The same scribewho wrote this shortsummary,placedat the bottomof the page,
alsowrotethe "Jerome"
summaryalsoquoted
summaryquotedabove,p. 840, butnot the "Augustine"
thereor any of the othertexts foundin the threediagramsgivingthe divisionsof Scripture.His slightly
slantedductusand mannerof formingd singlehim out for attentionand suggestthat he wroterather
rapidly.David Wright,in "SomeNotes on EnglishUncial,"Traditio17 (1961), 452, remarkedthat
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842
The previous divisions presented no problem since they were explicitly linked
to the names of Jerome and Augustine. It is unfortunate that we no longer have
the original text of the Codex Grandior for the Septuaginta division since I
strongly suspect that it was longer than the one we now read in Amiatinus and
that it followed some of the wording of the Institutiones more closely. It must
have begun, like the other two, with the words "Sic fiunt ueteris nouique testamenti secundum Septuaginta," echoing the title Cassiodorus had given this chapter
in his Institutiones. However, without the benefit of the Institutiones, showing
that Cassiodorus was making double use of the number seventy, such an introductory phrase was bound to cause puzzlement at Wearmouth-Jarrow, where
"Septuaginta" would be naturally associated with those who translated the Old
Testament Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and not with a division of Scripturethat
totalled seventy books and included both Old and New Testaments.76Cassiodorus
himself was mainly intent on a game of combining numbers, forty-four books for
the Old Testament added to twenty-six for the New Testament, allowing him to
reach the mystical number seventy, which he associated with Exod. 15.27 and the
seventy palm trees at Elim.
One can also conjecture, on the basis of the Institutiones, that in the Codex
Grandior summary, in addition to the names of Hilary of Poitiers and Epiphanius
of Cyprus, those of Rufinus and of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon were
also included. Since Cassiodorus had caused works of Epiphanius to be translated
into Latin,77 he again paraded this fact in his summary, and the WearmouthJarrow community (again without benefit of the Institutiones) must have wondered about the identity of the author making this personal statement: "quem
Latino fecimus sermone transferri."78That Hilary of Poitiers's name should appear
connected with a division headed secundum Septuaginta convinced them that a
mistake had been made, and they did some sleuthing to rectify it. This is the most
interesting element of the Amiatinus summary, since Bede may well have had a
hand in the "correction" that was introduced. We saw above that in the list of the
Institutiones the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon were included. If we assume
that the names of these same councils were present in the summary of the Codex
Grandior, we may have the key to the puzzle. Bede was quite familiar with the
"one hand active in the diagrams appears to have made a number of corrections throughout the
Codex." If the hand he had in mind was this distinctive hand just alluded to, a full study of all his
interventions in the manuscript would be worth undertaking, to see if the evidence suggests it could
be Bede's.
76 Note that Cassiodorus's text cited above combines the
seventy translators of the Old Testament
with another use of seventy to indicate the total for the Old and New Testament books, taken together.
In the title he gave to this chapter the number game, rather than the translators, seems to have been
uppermost in his mind.
(ed. Mynors, p. 24): "... Epiphanius antistes Cyprius totum librum [Canticle
of Canticles] Graeco sermone uno volumine sub brevitate complexus est. hunc nos ut alios in Latinam
linguam per amicum nostrum virum disertissimum Epiphanium fecimus Domino iuvante tranferri."It
is not clear whether the alios refers to other works of Bishop Epiphanius, or to other Greek works
also translated by Cassiodorus's friend, whom elsewhere he calls Epiphanius scholasticus.
78 It seems doubtful that the Codex Grandior summary also included the name of Epiphanius scholasticus.
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843
figure of Pope Hilarus (461-68), who as deacon to Pope Leo had requested Victor
of Aquitaine to look into the matter of the Easter table.79 We know also that
Wearmouth-Jarrow possessed a copy of the Liber pontificalis. Here in the biography for Pope Hilarus we read:
[Hilarus] confirmans III synodos Niceni, Epheseni et Calcidonense uel tomum sancti
episcopiLeoniset damnavitEutychemet Nestoriumvel omnes sequaceseorumet vel

omnes hereses;et confirmansdominationemet principatumsanctaesedis catholicaeet
apostolicae.... Hic fecit monasterioad sanctumLaurentiumet balneumet alium sub
aereet pretorium[sanctoStephano.FecitautemoratoriumsanctiStephaniin baptisterio
Lateranense]. Fecit autem et bibliothecas II in eodem loco.80
Reading the last sentences Bede would have concluded no more than that Pope
Hilarus had caused two libraries to be built at the Lateran.81L. Duchesne's omission of the text in square brackets spawned the theory that Pope Hilarus (46168) had presented a Bible (or a Bible in two parts) to the monastery of S. Lorenzo
fuori le mura, that Cassiodorus had then consulted this Bible and taken its division
of the books of Scripture as the basis for the Septuaginta division of his Institutiones, all this implying, in turn, that Hilarus Romanae urbis antistes of the Codex
Amiatinus was Cassiodorus's correct text, while Hilarius Pictaviensis urbis antistes
of the Institutiones was a slip made either by Cassiodorus or some later scribe.82
79
Bede, De temporum ratione 43: "Haec et Hilarum [Hilarium ed.] papam post tot Nicaeni Concilii
tempora nouum cyclum petere et Victorium paschalem nouum condere persuasit" (CCSL 123B, p.
417). The excellent quality of Bede's text for the Ecclesiastical History shows that he accepted the
form Hilarus rather than Hilarius: see Historia ecclesiastica 2.19 (ed. Plummer, p. 123). One should
note that the presence of sanctus before the name in the Amiatinus summary guarantees that Hilary
of Poitiers was the original name in the Codex Grandior, corresponding to c. 14 of the Institutiones
(sanctus Hilarius); nowhere does Bede refer to Pope Hilarus as sanctus in his later writings.
801 quote from Theodor Mommsen's edition of the Liber pontificalis, MGH, Gesta pontificum Romanorum 1, pp. 107, 110. This corresponds to L. Duchesne, Le Liber pontificalis, 1 (Paris, 1886), pp.
242, 245. It is recognized that Mommsen's edition is often to be preferred to Duchesne's-a fact
admitted by Duchesne himself in his review of Mommsen (Melanges d'archeologie et d'histoire 18
[1898], esp. pp. 382-83). Duchesne omitted the portion of the text in square brackets because it was
missing in A1 (Lucca 490) and A2 (a manuscript full of omissions). As my friend Michael McCormick
pointed out to me, we are dealing here with what was almost certainly originally an omission (in A1)
through word skip (Fecit autem ... Fecit autem). There are no serious grounds, as Mommsen recognized, for not accepting these words as part of the authentic text. This eliminates the basis for the
legend of Pope Hilarus's gift of a Bible (in two volumes) to San Lorenzo. What the text tells us is that
Hilarus constructed two libraries at the Lateran.
81 The use of bibliotheca
specifically to designate the Bible was rare and localized, especially in the
early Middle Ages. Bede's use of bibliotheca, throughout his works, always reflects Isidore's definition
(locus ubi reponuntur libri; librorum repositio; [ubi] recondantur libri). To designate a complete Bible,
Bede uses pandectes. Alcuin's invective against those-he probably had the Spanish Theodulf of Orleans in mind-who used bibliotheca (instead of pandectes) for a Bible demonstrates that the English
usage of pandectes rather than bibliotheca was well established during the early Middle Ages. On
Alcuin in this connection see P. Meyvaert, "The Authorship of the 'Libri Carolini': Observations
Prompted by a Recent Book," Revue benedictine 99 (1979), 42-43.
82 This was the
theory Samuel Berger proposed in "La Bible du Pape Hilarus," Bulletin critique 13
(1892), 147-52. It was accepted by Dom J. Chapman, "The Codex Amiatinus and Cassiodorus,"
Revue benedictine 38 (1926), 143-44; by Dom De Bruyne, ibid., 39 (1927), 262; by Courcelle, Les
lettres grecques en occident, p. 357, n. 2: "Cassiodore ... commet la bevue d'attribuer cette list, non
plus a Hilarus Romanae urbis antistes, mais a Hilarius Pictauiensis urbis antistes"; by Anscari Mundo,
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The section of Hilarus's biography that probably most impressed Bede and his
brethren was his ratification and confirmation (confirmans) of the Councils of
Nicaea and Chalcedon, the two councils Cassiodorus explicitly mentions in connection with his Septuaginta division of the Bible. Hilarus, bishop of Rome, must
therefore have seemed a more appropriate person than Hilary, bishop of Poitiers,
to approve any divisions of Scripture sanctioned by these councils. I remain convinced, therefore, that the substitution of Romanae urbis antistes for Pictaviensis
urbis antistes was not a slip of the pen but a deliberate attempt made in Northumbria to clarify what was considered a puzzle in part of Cassiodorus's lost summary.83This proves once again the difficulty experienced there in understanding
some elements of the Codex Grandior without the benefit of the Institutiones; the
Wearmouth-Jarrow community needed always to come to terms with the Codex
Grandior viewed in isolation, on its own. The greatest puzzle they encountered,
as we shall presently see, was that of interpreting the image they found standing
at the opening of their ancient pandect.84
5. THE TABERNACLEIMAGEIN THE CODEX AMIATINUS
Cassiodorus placed an image of the Tabernacle in his Codex Grandior, and the
Codex Amiatinus likewise contains such an image (Fig. 1).85 Can we take it for
granted that the Northumbrians faithfully copied the late-antique model from
Vivarium? Several considerations indicate that they did. First, as regards the po-
"'Bibliotheca': Bible et lecture du Careme d'apres Saint Benoit," Revue benedictine 60 (1950), 9091. G. Wilpert, also using Duchesne's text of the Liber pontificalis, took the passage to mean that
Hilarus had built two libraries at San Lorenzo: see Miscellanea agostiniana, 2 (Rome, 1931), p. 3. The
point that really requires explaining is why, at Wearmouth-Jarrow,Hilarius Pictauiensis of the Codex
Grandior (and of the Institutiones) was changed to Hilarus Romanae urbis antistes in the Codex
Amiatinus.
83 It is interesting that in Amiatinus the second i of Hilarius was deliberately erased, probably to
eliminate further confusion. The manuscript tradition of Bede's De temporum ratione shows confusion
between Hilarus/Hilarius, while Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (2.19) firmly maintains the form Hilarus;
see n. 79 above.
84 See the discussion of the "Ezra"
image below, pp. 870-82.
85 The
image occupies the present fols. IIv-IIIr (or 2v-IIIr; on the mixing of arabic and roman
numerals in the present foliation see below, p. 860). For reproductions of this image see Henri Quentin,
Memoire sur I'etablissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome, 1922), p. 447; Cecil Roth, "Jewish Antecedents of Christian Art," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953), plate 10a
(entitled "The Sanctuary");Bruce-Mitford, "The Art of the Codex Amiatinus," color plate D (wrongly
entitled "Templeof Solomon at Jerusalem");Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, illus. 23 (wrongly entitled
"Tabernacle in the Temple"); Elisabeth Revel-Neher, "Du Codex Amiatinus et ses rapports avec les
plans du tabernacle dans l'art juif et dans l'art byzantin," Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982), p. 7, fig. 1;
Bianca Kiihnel, "Jewish Symbolism of the Temple and the Tabernacle and Christian Symbolism of the
Holy Sepulchre and the Heavenly Tabernacle,"Jewish Art 12-13 (1986-87), 166, fig. 11. The illustration given here (Fig. 1) is based on the drawing made for Raffaele Garrucci's Storia della arte
cristiana nei primi otto secoli della chiesa (Prato, 1872-81), tav. 126, 2. A comparison of this drawing
with the best photographic reproductions shows that the artist had made a careful and accurate copy.
Garrucci's artist left out the names that surround the court and the Tabernacle (of the Tribes and
Levites), and they have not been added to Fig. 1. See n. 104 below, however, for the probable source
from which Cassiodorus borrowed these names.
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845
sition of the vase in the court, any image designedor remodeledat WearmouthJarrowwould certainlyhave placed the altar of holocaustsmuch more toward
the east within the court, so that the labrumcould be situatedbetweenit and the
entranceto the Tabernacle,in accordancewith the texts of Exodus:(40.7) "labrum
interaltareet tabernaculumquod implebisaqua";(40.28) "labrumquoquestatuit
intertabernaculumtestimoniiet altare."Bedeseveraltimescommentsspecifically
on the allegoricalmeaningof this placementof the labrumbetweenthe two altars,
of holocaustsin the court and of incensewithin the Tabernacle.86
We can be sure
that a designoriginatingin his monasterywould have adheredmorecloselyto the
text of Scripture.The Amiatinusimage depictsthis labrum-the laver for ceremonialwashingthat stood in the courtof the Tabernacle-as a large,two-handled
vase with a broadbase.
What is strikingabout this vase, apartfrom its position in the court, is its size,
the elegantshape of its handles,and its decoration.The best drawingto consult
is the one preparedwell over a centuryago for RaffaeleGarrucci'sStoriadella
arte cristiana,showing some elementsof decorationon the vase still discernible
at the time but now difficultto make out in more recentphotographicreproductions. Exod. 38.8 refersto a bronzelaver(labrumaeneum),andthe handlesshown
in the imageindicatethat we aredealingwith a metalratherthana ceramicvase.87
This is a vase that comes out of the world of Cassiodorus,as can be seen from
examples both in the Byzantineart of the period88and in the art of Ravenna.89
This featuredeservesnotice since the closest parallelto the armariumwith the
books of the Biblein the Ezraimage of Amiatinusis the one with Gospel books
in the mausoleumof Galla Placidiaat Ravenna.90This must representa style of
vase currentin Italy in Cassiodorus'stime;Vivariummay have possessedseveral
such labra.In the Amiatinusimage the labrumtakes pride of place in the court,
almostdwarfingthe ratherminusculealtarof holocausts.Cassiodorus'sartistobviously took pleasurein presentingthis object, and one must regretno longer
being able to see the originalversionof the Codex Grandior.
A furtherpoint that underlinesthe accuracyof the Amiatinuscopy concerns
the two altars.Exodus(c. 27) specifiedthat the altarof holocaustswas to be made
of acaciawood and was to be portable.Bede,no doubt accustomedto seeingand
thinkingof altarsas rathersolid and massivestructures,was thereforesurprised
86
For example, De Tabernaculo 3 (CCSL 119A, p. 137, 11.1729-36): "Post altare uero holocausti
labrum erat positum in quo lauarentur qui ad altare incensi intrabant quia nemo repente fit summus
sed proficientibus meritis quisque primo bella debet uitiorum deuincere deinde a conditore suo cum
compunctione lacrimarum supplex impetrare ut pro ingressu regni dulces fundere fletus possit qui pro
timore poenarum pridem fundebat amaros."
87 I am
very grateful to my friend Dr. Cecile Evers, a classical scholar (presently Attachee aux Musees
Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire at Brussels), for pointing this out to me, and providing me with numerous
references to similar vase designs. It was she who drew my attention to the prevalence of such designs
at Ravenna.
88 See in
particular the vases depicted in Byzantine mosaics in Jordan: Michele Piccirillo, The Mosaics
of Jordan (Amman, Jordan, 1993), illus. 34, 98, 302, 374, 449.
89 See Giselda Valenti Zucchini and Mileda
Bucci, eds., I sarcofagi a figure e a carattere simbolico,
Corpus della scultura paleocristiana bizantina ed altomedioevale di Ravenna 2 (Rome, 1968), tav. 11
d; 12 c; 17 a, b; 25 c; 28 b; 29 b; 31 c.
90On the Ezra image see below, pp. 870-82.
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846
0,~
: ,I .. zv,
-.
,..
Ii!NWI
^
LAer.,,-.B
ENOS ES
I.
AE
. ANT t
Fig. 1. Codex Amiatinus: The court with Tabernacle (see n. 85).

that the two altars in Cassiodorus's image should be represented as pieces of furniture, each standing on four legs-a detail for which he could find no support
in Scripture or in the writings of Josephus. He concluded that Cassiodorus had
received information about this detail from some learned Jews.91Since both altars
91Bede, De Tabernaculo 2 (CCSL 119A, pp. 81-82,11. 1567-70): "... in qua etiam [pictura] utrique
altari et holocausti uidelicet et incensi pedes quattuor fecit quod utrumque eum sicut et tabernaculi et
templi positionem a doctoribus Iudaeorum didicisse putamus." Bede was obviously unaware of Byzan-
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N-
AR KTOC
A
'"
if
rr~~~~~~~~~~~s
,
~~eE
*II1;Cr.
I.if
A
N
A
ly
H i.
1.
II
II
lj
M*CH M bPIA
Fig. 2. "Covered and anchored" Tabernacle in the court (see n. 101).
Fig. 3. "Uncovered" Tabernacle (see n. 110).
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848
in the Amiatinus painting are shown with four pedes, they must have been copied
faithfully from the Codex Grandior. One can observe that the altar of incense,
despite its feet, has a more solid look than the altar of holocausts. Bede remarks
that this last altar had an opening in the front, on the eastern side, to allow wood
to be added and coals to be removed from the fire pan.92Did he expect an opening
for such a purpose to be placed less conspicuously, either in the back or on the
side? The description he gives of the frontal opening corresponds to what we see
in the Amiatinus image, although it is only the perspective from which the altar
was drawn that caused the opening on the eastern side to appear to be the largest.93
One can well imagine a Jarrow artist, working under Bede's supervision, presenting very different designs for these altars. Bede therefore becomes a witness to the
fact that certain elements in the Tabernacle image of Amiatinus were borrowed
directly from the image of the Codex Grandior.
A fuller analysis of the Tabernacle image takes us into a cultural world with
which Cassiodorus was more familiar than were the monks of Jarrow. Although
it has sometimes been suggested that the image of Amiatinus is related to Jewish
iconographic traditions,94the direct link is with illustrations in Greek manuscripts,
like illustrated Octateuchs and the manuscripts of Cosmas Indicopleustes, some
of whose Exodus illustrations seem linked to the Octateuch tradition.95There are
tine images that showed altars with pedes. For some examples: (1) the altar of holocausts on fol. 104v
of the [now lost] Smyrna Octateuch (Derk Christiaan Hesseling, Miniatures de l'Octateuque grec de
Smyrne [Leiden, 1909], illus. 199); (2) the altar on fol. 88r of the Seraglio Octateuch (KurtWeitzmann,
Illustrations in Roll and Codex [Princeton, N.J., 1970], plate xxxix, illus. 128); (3) an altar of incense
having feet, placed within the Tabernacle, in a Byzantine illustration first published by Suzy Dufrenne
("Une illustration 'historique' inconnue, du Psautier du Mont-Athos, Pantocrator 61," Cahiers archeologiques 15 [1965], 83, fig. 1). The pre-iconoclastic Byzantine tradition must have been a rich
one; these illustrations merely provide hints about the many artistic models available to Cassiodorus's
artist.
92
Bede, De Tabernaculo 2 (CCSL 119A, p. 81, 11.1563-67): "Erat enim contra arulam ostium in
pariete altaris orientali unde uel ligna ad alendum ignem inmitti uel carbones et cineres possent egeri
quo modo in pictura Cassiodori Senatoris ... expressum uidimus...."
93
On a point like this it becomes interesting to speculate what notion of perspective drawing Bede
could have had. If something is obvious to us, with our modern-day understanding of perspective, it
does not necessarily follow that Bede would have reached our conclusions. Looking at the Amiatinus
altar we would tend to conclude that it could have been serviced equally efficiently from any one of
its four sides.
94
Roth, "Jewish Antecedents," pp. 37-38, considered the Amiatinus image proof of the existence
of a contemporary Jewish iconographic tradition depicting the Tabernacle with its court, an opinion
about which Revel-Neher has serious doubts (see next note).
95 Revel-Neher, "Du Codex Amiatinus," pp. 12-13, questions Roth's
theory of a continuous Jewish
iconographic tradition (see previous note) and considers the Byzantine tradition, as shown in the
manuscripts of Cosmas and the Greek Octateuchs, to be a more likely source of inspiration for Cassiodorus's illustration. The present analysis aims to explore her suggestion more fully. To the illustrations of Vatican Library,Vat. gr. 746 and 747 cited by Revel-Neher, one can add those of the (twelfthcentury) Greek Octateuch of Smyrna published by Hesseling (Miniatures de l'Octateuque). As regards
the manuscripts of Cosmas (Vat. gr. 699; Mount Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery, gr. 1186; and Florence, Laurenziana, Plut. IX.28) the references here will be to Wolska-Conus's study and edition (above,
n. 45). For the illustrations of Vat. gr. 699 alone, see Cosimo Stornajolo, Le miniature della Topografia
cristiana di Cosma Indicopleuste: Codice Vaticano greco 699 (Milan, 1908). Weitzmann, Illustrations
in Roll and Codex (see esp. pp. 141 and 198-99), has argued strongly that many of the biblical
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849
at least two Greek manuscripts for whose presence at Jarrow Bede provides evidence, namely, a copy of the Acts of the Apostles and a Greek calendar.96We
know, on the other hand, that Cassiodorus caused a Greek pandect, containing
the whole of Scripture in seventy-five books, to be prepared for his community.97
This implies that he had other Greek biblical manuscripts at his disposal, from
which to prepare the pandect. His familiarity with and possession of Greek manuscripts should cause no surprise, since we know that he spent many years at Constantinople.98The Institutiones, moreover, bears ample witness to the fact that he
had accumulated a substantial library of Greek texts, some of which he caused to
be translated into Latin.99
Two particular illustrations from the Greek tradition, one showing the court of
the Tabernacle, the other the Tabernacle itself (Figs. 2 and 3), were apparently
fused together by Cassiodorus's artist, and transformed in the process, to produce
the image of the Codex Grandior whose reflection we find in the Codex Amia-
illustrationsin Cosmasderivefromthe ByzantineOctateuchtradition.It was this traditionon which

Cassiodorusmost probablydrew.For a contraryview, arguingthat the Cosmasillustrationsof the
Tabernacleare the sourceof the GreekOctateuchimages,see LeslieBrubaker,"TheTabernacleMiniaturesof the ByzantineOctateuchs,"Actesdu XVe CongresInternationald'EtudesByzantines(Athens, 1981), 2/1:73-92. Whateverthe preciseoriginalsource,therecan be no doubtthat Cassiodorus
had at his disposalByzantineimagesenablinghim to constructthe image of the Tabernaclewhose
reflectionwe perceivein the CodexAmiatinus.
96 CarmelaFranklinis
undertakinga full study of Bede'sknowledgeof Greekthat will help to
determinewhat Greekmanuscriptswere presentat Wearmouth-Jarrow.
It is recognizedthat Bede
workedwith a Greekmanuscriptof Acts while composinghis commentary:see M. L. W. Laistner's
introductionto BedaeVenerabilisExpositioActuumApostolorumet Retractatio(Cambridge,
Mass.,
1939), pp. xxxix-xl. As regardsthe Greekcalendarsentto JarrowfromRome,we havethe testimony
of Bedehimselfin chapter14 of his De temporumratione(CCSL123B,pp. 327-28). Unfortunately
this chapterwas misintepretedby C. W.Jones, then at the very outset of his investigationinto this
text, as referringto the receptionatJarrowof the Latincalendarof PolemiusSilvius("PolemiusSilvius,
Bede,and the Names of the Months,"Speculum9 [1934], 50-56). Bedeneverknewthe calendarof
Polemius,as I hope to show in a forthcomingarticle,"Bede'sCalendarandthe Originsof Valentine's
codex (referredto by
Day."This articlewill, alas, also dispelthe theorythat the Cosmographiorum
Bedein his Historiaabbatum)could have been a Greekmanuscriptof the ChristianTopographyof
CosmasIndicopleustes,as recentlysuggestedin BiblicalCommentaries
from the CanterburySchool
of Theodoreand Hadrian,ed. BernhardBischoffand MichaelLapidge(Cambridge,Eng., 1994), pp.
209-10. Bede'sstatementin chapter35 of the De temporumrationeallows us to concludethat this
"mostnoble"codex,containingtheworksof thecosmographers,
was a Latinmanuscriptthatincluded,
amongother items, a Romancalendar,some of whose entriesBedecopiedinto his own calendarof
the De temporumratione.
97 Institutiones1.14.4
(ed. Mynors,p. 41): "... ideoquevobis et Graecumpandectemreliquicomprehensumin librisseptuagintaquinque...."
98
James J. O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), p. 132, gives 540 to 545 as the dates of
Cassiodorus's stay in Constantinople. Van de Vyver's more meticulous analysis of the data places this
stay from at least 549 to 553; see "Les Institutiones de Cassiodore," p. 78. Whatever its exact length,
Cassiodorus had plenty of time to familiarize himself with and collect Greek biblical and other manuscripts. Van de Vyver also conjectures that it was during his stay in the imperial city that Cassiodorus
came to know about the school of Nisibis mentioned at the beginning of his Institutiones (on this see
also n. 45 above).
99On the Latin translations Cassiodorus commissioned see Walter Berschin, Griechisch-lateinisches
Mittelalter (Bern, 1980), pp. 100-102.
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850
tinus.100We need first to examine the layout of the Tabernacle court. There seems
to have been a conventional manner of representing this court in the Byzantine
tradition, because we find the same arrangement in the Octateuchs and in the
manuscripts of Cosmas.101The outline of the court consists of a series of pillars
(columnae)-the number shown is usually less than the twenty (long side) and
ten (narrow side) specified in Exod. 26.9-19. They can be described as lying flat
on the ground and seen from above.102The function of these pillars or shafts was
to support the hangings that stretched around the whole perimeter of the courtyard. Since the pillars have a uniform cylindrical appearance, with no observable
distinction made between base and capital, it is not immediately obvious whether
the hangings were meant to be seen as "outside" or "inside"the pillars by someone
standing within the court. The image can be read either way, depending on which
end of the column one considers to be its base. The distinguishing feature of these
Byzantine illustrations is the presence of corner columns placed at a different angle
to the rest.
A first point to determine about the Amiatinus image is the angle from which
the bifolium should be viewed. Elisabeth Revel-Neher writes, "Nous dechiffrons
la miniature, non 'livre ouvert,' mais en faisant un quart de tour a la double page:
I'entree du parvis, situee sur la partie droite en devient ainsi le cote inferieur."I
agree with this observation, which will turn out to be crucial for understanding
the drawing. Normally the reader placed in front of a book has the bottom margins of both pages before him. But the Amiatinus image, designed to fill two pages,
was meant to be seen as a single unit, on its own. To see it properly the viewer
must glance at it from the outer margin of the recto sheet, thus facing the entrance
to the courtyard, and looking all the way up that courtyard to the entrance of the
Tabernacle itself. From this position all the objects shown within the courtyard
and the Tabernacle, together with their labels, appear in a frontal perspective to
the viewer.
100In these Byzantineimagesof the courtyard,the Tabernacleitself, "covered,"is also shown, anchoredby two ropes,which stretchfromthe cornersof the roof to anchorpegsin the ground.RevelNeher ("DuCodexAmiatinus,"p. 13) believedthatthis featureof anchoringthe Tabernaclewas "une
TheHebrewtext,
erreur,ce sont les mursdu parvisqui etaientainsifixeset non ceux du Tabernacle."
however,associatesanchorpegs with both the Tabernacleand the courtyard(Exod.27.19): "allthe
tent pegs for it [theTabernacle]and those for the courtyardareto be of bronze"(seeJohnR. Kohlenberger III, The NIV Interlinear Hebrew-English Old Testament, 1 [Grand Rapids, Mich., 1979], p.
222). Althoughthe Septuaginttext refersonly to anchorpegs for the courtyard,we also findmention
of the Tabernaclehere and there amongthe manuscriptvariantsfor Exod. 27.19 (see JohnWilliam
Wevers'seditionof Exodusin the GottingenSeptuagintaseries[Gottingen,1991], p. 310). Thismust
haveled the Byzantineartistto representthis feature.The Tabernacleanchorpegswerenot borrowed
by Cassiodorus'sartist,but he made those for the courtyardan integralpart of his drawing,as we
shallpresentlysee.
101Fig.2, above,is basedon the imagesof Cosmasin Vat.gr.699, fol. 49r (Stornajolo,Leminiature
della Topografia,plate 15), and Mount Sinaigr. 1186, fol. 82v (SC 159, p. 71) and in the Octateuch
in Vat. gr. 746, fol. 242v (Revel-Neher,"Du Codex Amiatinus,"p. 12, fig. 8). The entranceto the
courtis suggestedeitherthrougha changein the backgroundcoloror by introducinga differentdesign,
as in the Mount Sinaimanuscript(copiedhere).
102
Findingthe appropriateterminologyfor describingthe layout of the pillarsis not easy.RevelNeher ("DuCodexAmiatinus")uses both "perspective
rayonnante"and "perspectiveaerienne."
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For the outline of his courtyard Cassiodorus's artist adopted the basic Byzantine
plan, maintaining the corner pillars at the same angle, but he introduced a number
of changes aimed at presenting a more realistic image of the courtyard.103He made
a clear distinction between the base of the column and its capital; the base is
rounded and the capital, shaped like a rectangle, had a spike at its summit, presumably to hold rings from which the hangings were suspended. He likewise carefully oriented the pillars on the north (arctos) and west (dysis) sides in the same
direction as those on the east (anatol) and south (mesembria) sides, and he created
the illusion of an "outside" and "inside" view of the court by placing the hangings
behind the pillars on the north and west sides and in front of them on the east
and south sides.104To someone standing in the court the hangings would therefore
appear as a kind of continuous wall all the way around, in accordance with Cassiodorus's Latin rendering of Josephus: "cortina ... concludens omnem per cirTo get a proper sense of this
cuitum locum, ut nihil a pariete differre uideretur."105
the
around
180
one
needs
to
turn
perspective
image
degrees and see it as a bird'sview
taken
the
from
upper right-hand (dysis/arctos) corner. From this angle
eye
we perceive in sequence the north and west "outside" view and the east and south
"inside" view of the courtyard.106
When the image is seen from this angle, we also perceive how another element
103
Because he was using a double folio he had room to insert the correct number of pillars, twenty
for the long and ten for the narrow side-numbers that include the corner pillar placed at the end of
each line.
104 The names of the four cardinal points were taken over from the Byzantine model being used. In
the Cosmas illustration these names (ANATOLH, DYCIC, APKTOS, MECHMBPRIA) were written
along the outside border of the court (see SC 159, p. 71, and Stornajolo, Le miniature della Topografia,
p. 31 and plate 15). Corsano ("The First Quire," pp. 10-11) had conjectured that a fondness in the
Insular tradition for these names-because together their first letters spell the name of Adam-had
led to their inclusion in the image of Amiatinus. But given the dependence of Cassiodorus's artist on
his Byzantine models, there is no need to postulate any other source than the image of the Codex
Grandior for what we find in Amiatinus. In Cassiodorus's image these names were placed within the
court so as to leave room on the outside for the names of the twelve Hebrew tribes (not reproduced
in Fig. 1). Here also one can suspect that the immediate model for Cassiodorus was a Byzantine image
rather than the text of Exodus-which remains, of course, the ultimate source. The Cosmas manuscripts have an illustration showing the position of all the Hebrew tribes around the Tabernacle court,
as well as of those Levites who had charge of the Tabernacle within the court itself, in addition to
Moses and Aaron shown standing in front of the Tabernacle; see SC 141, p. 195, for the image from
Mount Sinai gr. 1186, fol. 86v, and in SC 159, p. 89, that of Vat. gr. 699, fol. 52r; as regards this last
folio see also Stornajolo, Le miniature della Topografia, plate 17.
105This is the end of the text
quoted below in n. 108.
106
Moshe Levine, The Tabernacle: Its Structure and Utensils, 4th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1989), attempted a
careful reconstruction of the Tabernacle, with its court, based entirely on the text of Exodus. In this
reconstruction (see esp. pp. 73 and 81) he placed the pillar shafts on the "inside," with the hangings
stretched "outside" them-although there is nothing in the text of Exodus that compels this arrangement rather than its reverse. In her fig. 2, Revel-Neher reproduced a plate from Levine's publication,
and she then tried to read the Amiatinus image in the same manner-that is, considering the pillars
to be on the inside-thus stating that the north and west sides represented an "inside" view and the
south and east sides the "exterior" of the courtyard ("Du Codex Amiatinus," pp. 6-7). But this is the
opposite of what we actually see in the Amiatinus painting. The little spikes, surmounting each capital,
surely indicate the tops of the pillars and not the parts placed on the ground.
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of the Amiatinus design is to be understood.107Exod. 27.19 connected anchor

pegs with the hangings that surrounded the courtyard. The image Josephus gives
is that of columns fitted with rings, presumably at their summit, and cords stretching from these rings down to the heads of anchor pegs driven into the ground
between the shafts, their function being to stabilize the hangings against the blowing winds.108Cassiodorus's artist did not follow the verbal description of Josephus
but instead borrowed an element from another Byzantine image of the Tabernacle
to illustrate this anchoring of the hangings to the ground. In this image (Fig. 3),
which shows the "uncovered" Tabernacle (to which I will return momentarily),
we can notice, a little above ground level, a row of linked arcs that always meet
at the midpoint between the "lance" shafts. The Vivarium artist transferred this
line of linked arcs to the ground level in his image of the courtyard, to suggest
that the bottom edge of the hangings was anchored to the ground at regular
intervals between the columns.109
The same Greek model provided Cassiodorus's artist with another idea, namely,
that of showing the Tabernacle without its roof or coverings.110In the Byzantine
illustration (Fig. 3), which is extremely schematic, we see a division between the
107
We shall have good reasonto returnto this particularperspectivewhen reconstructingCassiodorus'slost imageof the Templefromthe Codex Grandior.Lookingat the total imageof the Tabernacle,we can see two differentperspectivesat work, one for the courtyard,the otherfor the objects
shown within it. This confusionof perspectivesis no doubt due to the varietyof visualsourcesconsultedby the artist.AndreGrabarregardssuchmixingof perspectivesas a phenomenonof late-antique
art: "Plotinet les originesde l'esthetiquemedievale,"Cahiersarcheologiques1 (1945), 21. For an
interestingexampleof perspective,presentingtwo walls of a rectangularstructurefromthe "inside"
and two fromthe "outside,"see fig. 8 in the articleby BiancaKiihnel(n. 85, above);this illustration,
from a manuscriptof Prudentius'sPsychomachia,probablyderivesfrom a modelof the late-antique
period.Cassiodorus'sartistwas no doubtfamiliarwith suchillustrations.
108Josephus,Antiquities3.109-10 (ed. Blatt, p. 232): "tabulasquead instarcolumnarumstatuit
aereasquinquecubitorumhabentesaltitudinem.... anuliautemtabulissingulisinerantet capitatabularumargentea.basesautemdeaurataeet caelataepercircuitumet in terraconfixaepertingebantque
funesab anulisductaeusquead capitaclavorumaeneorumqui erantmagnitudinecubitiet persingulas
tabulasin terramvalidepositi, ut ex violentiaventorumtabernaculumimmobilecustodirent.cortina
veromollissimaex byssoperomnesundiquependebat,a capitetabularumdescendensad basemusque
diffusaet concludensomnemper circuitumlocum,ut nihila parietedifferrevideretur."
109In the Byzantineimagesthe line of arcsis meantto representthe outermosthangingthatcovers
the Tabernacleitself.
110Fig. 3, above, showingthe "uncovered"
Tabernacle,with the Ark of the Covenantin one compartmentand the tablefor the show-breadwith the candlestickin the other,is drawnafterthe images
of Cosmasin Vat. gr. 699, fol. 49r (Stornajolo,Le miniaturedella Topografia,plate 13), and in the
SmyrnaOctateuch,fol. 99v (Hesseling,Miniaturesde l'Octateuque,illus. 194), whichhaveidentical
Plut.IX.28, fol. 107r,therod
drawings.In Mount Sinaigr. 1186, fol. 82v, andFlorence,Laurenziana,
of Aaron,the tablesof the law, the goldenvase, and the brazenserpenthave beenaddedto the table
and candlestick.Wolska-Conusdoes not believethese additionalobjectswere part of the original
Cosmasimagery(see SC 159, pp. 44-45). To underlinefurtherlinksbetweenCosmasand the Octateuch:the table and candlestick,shown separately,seem identicalin Mount Sinaigr. 1186, fol. 81r,
and LaurenzianaPlut. IX.28, fol. 126v (SC 159, pp. 60-61), and in the SmyrnaOctateuch,fol.
98r-v (Hesseling,illus. 192-93). A folio is missingat this pointfromVat.gr.699. Similarlythe layout
showingfour Tabernaclecoveringsin Cosmas(SC 141, p. 194) agreeswith the SmyrnaOctateuch,
fol. 100v (Hesseling,illus. 196). CloseagreementsbetweenCosmas-whose ChristianTopographyis
datedby Wolska-Conusto 546-49-and the Octateuchsare important,sincethey provideevidence
of Byzantineoriginalsdatingfromthe time of Cassiodorus.
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Holy of Holies and the other part of the Tabernacle with the table for the breads
and the candelabrum (seemingly lying flat on the ground). The Vivarium artist
followed the idea of omitting the roof of the Tabernacle so that its contents could
be seen, but his attempt to show all the different layers that went into the structure
of the Tabernacle-using the same "inside" and "outside" perspective he had used
to depict the court-can hardly be considered a success. It was in fact an impossible task to suggest all at once, through the simple use of a few parallel lines (even
with different colors and textures), first wooden boards and then the multiple
layers of curtains and skins that covered the Tabernacle.1" The attempt to differentiate the thickness of the lines in the west and north sides from those of the east
and south, in order to achieve an "outside" and an "inside" view, adds considerably to the confusion. Thus the wooden boards appear as the outermost layer on
the east and south sides but seem to hold an inner position in the Tabernacle
structure on the west and north sides, where they figure more prominently. An
examination of the modern attempt by Moshe Levine to reconstruct the Tabernacle will provide a better understanding of what the sixth-century artist was
aiming to suggest.1l2
6. THE IMAGE OF THE TEMPLE IN THE CODEX GRANDIOR
The Codex Amiatinus has no image of the Temple equivalent to the one Cassiodorus placed in his Codex Grandior. Should we conclude that originally Ceolfrith ordered such an image for his new pandects but that the one from Amiatinus-the only pandect to survive complete-has been lost? Or could there have
been a decision not to include the Temple image in the new Bibles? Before we
tackle this question, we need to have some idea of what the Temple image in the
Codex Grandior looked like. Cassiodorus himself is not very helpful. As already
noted, he tells us only that Eusebius, his blind visitor from Asia (de partibus Asiae),
explained how both the Tabernacle and the Temple were constructed on the likeness of the heavens (ad instar caeli), and declares that as a consequence of this he
caused images of both the Tabernacle and the Temple to be painted and placed in
his Codex Grandior.1l3Bede is much more informative and had obviously made
a careful study of the two images in this codex. He was also familiar with all the
passages of Scripture that referred to the Temple, and with the descriptions to be
found in book 8 of the Antiquities of Josephus. We need here to differentiate the
data borrowed from the image from information based on other sources.
There are several passages in Bede that rely directly on the image and here and
there add some small detail about it. Taken together they allow us to form a fairly
complete picture of the most prominent features of the Temple image in the Codex
Grandior. Bede's most important passage is in the De Templo, but one should be
aware that it follows immediately on the following quotation from Josephus's
Antiquities that mentions porticus in the plural:
11 See the description in Exod. 26.1-37 and Exod. 36.8-38.

112
See n. 106 above.
113
See n. 45 above.
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854
Extrinsecus autem huius templi aliam aedificauit aulam quadranguli scemate factam
erigens maximas porticus atque latas et portas excelsas et amplas per quatuor mundi
partes in eo constituens quarum singulae ad unumquemque uentum quattuor angulis
attendebant ubi aureas ianuas collocauit; et paulo post: In hoc sacrarium omnes populi
quibus purgatio et obseruatio legitimorum inerat introibant.114
Bede connected this reference to porticus (in the plural) with what he saw in
Cassiodorus's image of the Temple, thus showing that he was interpreting the
word to mean a colonnade or arcade that formed part of a long quadrangularshaped building.115 So after quoting Josephus he continues:
Has uero porticus Cassiodorus Senator in pictura templi quam in pandecte posuit ut
ipse in psalmorum expositione commemorat triplici ordine distinxit, primum uidelicet
ordinem ponens extra atrium sacerdotum ex omni parte per quadrum, secundum eodem
modo extra intimas porticus undique uersum in gyro, extremum similiter ex omni latere
priorum porticuum in circuitu, sicque templum triformi aedificiorum praesidio ab omni
erat parte munitum facto pauimento sub diuo inter aedificia singula de marmore et
parietibus domorum in interioribus, hoc est eis qui ad templum respiciebant factis in
columnis exterioribus uero solidis, sicque fiebat ut omnis structura templi pro graduum
esset uarietate rationabiliter distincta.116
114
Bede, De Templo 2 (CCSL 119A, p. 192, 11.21-27), citing Josephus, Antiquities 8.3.9 [96]. For
the Greektext see JewishAntiquities8.[95], Loebseries,5:622. Bede's"paulopost"is puzzlingsince

nothingis omittedeitherin the Greekor Latinversions.Blatt's1958 criticaleditionof Cassiodorus's
Latintranslationdid not extend beyondbook 5. This is unfortunate,since almostcertainlyit is this
sectionof Josephusthat inspiredCassiodorus'sCodex Grandiorimageof the Templeprecincts,with
its threeconcentricbuildingssurroundingthe courtof the priestson all four sides (quadranguliscemate).I quotethe sectionsimmediatelyfollowingthe passagein BedefromColumbiaUniversity,MS
Plimpton43, fols. 72v-73r: "Siquidemmirabiliset omnis sermoneprecipuafuit haec sessio quia
proptercontemplationissessionisipsiusexcedebataulaqueforiseratmagnaseffundensprofunditates.
Quampropterinfinitamcelsitudinemnon poterataliquissineterroreconspicere,et erigensfabricasin
effecit.
cubitisearumaltitudinem,equaleseasuerticimontisin quotemplumedificabatur
quadringentis
autem
Et proptereaaula que erat exteriussub diuo facta, erat equaliscum templo. Circumdederunt
porticibushancaulamduplicibus,columnaseas ex lapidenaturaliportantibus.Quarumcamereerant
de cedriset laquearibusexpressis.Basesautemin his omnibusfecit argenteas."(My sincerethanksto
Dr. ConsueloDutschkefor providingme with a transcriptfrom the Plimptonmanuscript.)We find
mentionhere of an "aulaexterius"and then of "porticibusduplicibus"surroundingthis "aula."The
allusionto "camere"also suggestedupperchambers.
115Bede'suse of porticusin this context deservesattention.In his EcclesiasticalHistoryand Lives
of the Abbots, when writingof a burialtakingplace in porticu,for example,that of Heribald"in
porticusanctiPetriin monasteriosuo" (Historiaecclesiastica5.6), he is thinkingof a particulardesignatedareawithin a church.Translatorsopt for words like "porch"or "chapel"in such a context.
ButBede'suse of the termin De Templo,basedon his perusalof Cassiodorus'simage,connectedwith
the terminologyof Josephus,shows that he also thoughtof porticusas a coveredwalk, open on one
side, with an arcadeor colonnade,which would shieldthose placednearby,or passingthroughit,
from inclementweather.It is interestingthat the excavationsat Wearmouthrevealedthe existenceof
andJarrowin TheirContinentalContext,"
sucha porticus:see RosemaryCramp,"Monkwearmouth
in ChurchesBuiltin AncientTimes,ed. KennethPainter(London,1994), p. 284 (whereshe also uses
the term "covered way"). Eamonn O Carragain, The City of Rome and the World of Bede, Jarrow
Lecture,1994 [Jarrow,Eng., 1994], p. 13 and nn. 61 and 62, suggeststhat familiaritywith similar
coveredwalks in Rome could underliethis architecturalfeatureat Wearmouth.It is possiblethat
Cassiodorus'simagemay also have had some influenceon the Wearmouthplanning.
116
Bede,De Templo2 (CCSL119A, pp. 192-93, 11.28-40): "CassiodorusSenator,in the imageof
the Templewhich he placedin his pandect(an imageto which he refersin his commentaryon the
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855
This coincideswith the descriptionBedehad givento Nothelmin his earlierwork,
ThirtyQuestions on Kings,when he did not yet know about the connectionof
the image with Cassiodorusand thought of it only as a picturaab antiquisformata:
Circumdabatur autem hoc atrium [sacerdotum] undique uersum a longe aede permaxima in quadrum cuius interior paries, id est qui templum a quattuor mundi partibus
respiciebat, inferius erat per totum in arcubus constructus ulterior uero firma soliditate
"etostiain basilica
fundatuset ianuashabensaereasut supradictumcommemorauimus,
maximis
et oportunis
etiam
communita
texit
aere"
Paral.
4.9], quae
[2
porticibus
quae
erat discreta caenaculis, et rursus extra hanc aedem in gyro altera simili scemate facta,
sed et tertia nihilo minus circa illam eodem ordine facta per gyrum interiora omnia longe
latequecircuibatin hoc tantuma prioribusdistansaedibusquod orientaliset septemtrionaliseius pariesostia minimehabebateo quod uterqueeorumad murospertineret
ciuitatis.117
In the image beforehim Bedethereforesaw a complex pattern,with the Temple

and the court of the priestssituatedat its center.He explainsthat the courtof the
priestswas oblong,extendingbeyondthe Templemuchmoretowardthe eastthan
toward the other sides.l8 The centralpart of the imagewas thereforea rectangle
rather than a square. Around this rectangle were arranged three long buildings,
also formed in the shape of rectangles, one outside the other, with sufficient space
between them to allow this space to be termed a court (atrium). The lower parts
of the inner walls of these buildings, namely, those facing the Temple, were shown
Psalms), distinguished three such porticoes. He placed the first outside the court of the priests surrounding this court on all four sides. The second stood outside the innermost one, surrounding it also
completely. The outermost portico surrounded the other two, again in a similar fashion. In this way
the Temple was protected on all sides by a threefold array of buildings, with a marble pavement filling
the open space between these buildings. The inner walls of the buildings, namely, those facing the
Temple, were formed of columns, while the outer walls were solid. In this manner the whole layout
of the Temple was rationally ordered to accommodate the variety of its occupants."
117 Bede, In Regum Librum XXX quaestiones 18 (CCSL 119, pp. 311-12, 11.33-45): "This court
of the priests was surrounded on all sides by an extremely long, four-sided, building. The lower part
of the inner walls of this building, namely, those directly facing the Temple from the four cardinal
points, was made up completely of arches, while the outer walls of the building formed a solid structure.
It had large bronze gates, of which we spoke earlier (2 Paral. 4.9, 'And the doors of the basilica he
covered with bronze'). It was equipped with large porches and portioned into large and useful upper
chambers. Outside of this building, and surrounding it again on all sides, was another similar one,
and again outside this one stood a third similarly constructed. This last differed from the other two
only by the fact that the eastern and northern sides lacked gates, since these formed part of the city
walls." Note how Bede's "simili scemate facta" echoes the phrase of Cassiodorus ("quadranguliscemate
factam") quoted above, p. 854. Bede likewise used the word aedes ("dwelling") to describe these three
long quadrangular buildings in a passage from book 2 of his commentary on Ezra: "Sedit autem
populus in platea domus Dei, hoc est circa atrium sacerdotum quo ipsa domus Dei undique uersum
erat circumdata ut supra docuimus habens circa se ex omni parte per quadrum aedes atriorum amplissimas in quibus etiam populus, si quando propter pluuias opus esset, stare poterat et nihilominus
ea quae in templi ianuis gerebantur uel circa templum uidere; habebant namque interiores parietes
iuxta terram in columnis factos exteriores solidos" (CCSL 119A, p. 333, 11.1804-11).
118 Bede, In Regum Librum XXX quaestiones 18 (CCSL 119, p. 311, 11.25-28): "Erat autem hoc
idem atrium ab australi occidentali et septemtrionali parte uicinius muro templi, porro ad ortum solis
unde et introitum per gradus habebat in magnam se prolixitatem a templo protendebat...."
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as colonnades:"the lower portion of the innerwall consistedentirelyof arches"

("interiorparies... inferius... per totum arcubusconstructus");"thepartof the
innerwalls near the groundconsistedof columns"("interioresparietesiuxta terram in columnisfactos").Bedecould thereforeeasilyimaginethat crowdsstanding, walking, or sitting in these,courts might withdrawunderthe colonnadesif
the weather became inclement.PerhapsCassiodorus'simage containedsuggestions of openingsin the upperparts of the walls, indicatingthe chambersof an
upperstory.In any case the fact that the colonnadeBede saw in the image was
confinedto the lower portion of the innerwall of the building(inferius.. . iuxta
terram)would have sufficedto suggestto him a differentpurposefor the upper
parts of these buildings,namely,to providedwellingchambers.This is obviously
what he had in mindwhen explainingEzra10.6: "ThenEzrarose up frombefore
the house of God, andwent to the chamber(cubile)of Johananthe son of Eliasib."
Bedecomments:
Deniquealia editiopro cubiliIohannanpastoforiumIohannamhabet,quo nominesolet
saepe scriptura porticus illas cognominare quibus templum erat undique circumdatum
et in quibusministriet custodeseiusdemtemplimanereconsuerant.119
The accompanying Figure 4, which attempts to recapture the image Bede gazed
upon, was begun on a large sheet of paper equivalent in size to a bifolium of
Amiatinus. It was designed on the assumption that Cassiodorus's artist, when
drawing the Temple complex, would have used the same size sheet as for the
Tabernacle drawing and would also have used the same angle of perspective for
the three long buildings surrounding the central court of the priests as for the
perimeter (columns with hangings) of the Tabernacle court discussed above.120
That he did adhere to such a schema seems proved from the fact that Bede could
easily distinguish between the front (inside) and back (outside) walls of these three
long quadrangular buildings. No doubt the Vivarium artist handled the threedimensional depiction of the buildings, with the arches forming a continuous colonnade, differently from the way they are handled here, but I remain persuaded
that Bede would recognize the present drawing. This image, like that of the Tabernacle court, makes most sense when perceived, in bird's-eye view, from the
(arctos-dysis) northwest angle. In Cassiodorus's image Bede could see that the east
and north walls of the outermost building lacked gates, and no doubt the way the
gates were shown in that image differed from the way they are indicated here.
Bede saw that the gates on each side were aligned (contra inuicem posita),121 to
allow those in the outermost courts, as he remarks, to see the Temple itself when
they were open. Bede describes the open spaces (atria) between the three buildings
as paved by flagstones of different colors (lapide uario sunt omnia strata). Perhaps
119
Bede,In Ezramet Neemiam2 (CCSL119A, p. 331, 11.1759-63).
120
See above, p. 851, and n. 106.
121 CCSL
119, pp. 312-13, 11.74-76: "Itauero ostia in aedibuscontrainuicemposita erantut hi
etiamqui in ultimis[atriis]consistebanttemplumpossentintueri."
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DYSIS
ANATOL
Fig. 4. A reconstruction of the Temple image in the Codex Grandior.
Cassiodorus's artist had borrowed some of the checkerboard designs he found in

the Byzantine images to suggest such a variegated paving.122
122 In the Cosmas and Octateuch
manuscripts these checkerboard designs represent the covering of
the Tabernacle: the checkerboard drawing in Mount Sinai gr. 1186, fol. 79r (SC 159, p. 57) agrees
with that of the Smyrna Octateuch, fol. 100v (Hesseling, illus. 196). But the designs, taken by themselves, might well have suggested a pavement design to the Vivarium artist.
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858
Contemplating this whole arrangement of buildings and courts, Bede found it

very satisfying; it no doubt appealed to his logical bent of mind:
... structuratempli pro graduumesset uarietaterationabiliterdistincta.Namque in
sancta sanctorumingrediebaturpontifex, in ipsum templumsacerdotespurificatiuna
cum leuitis,in atriumsacerdotumsacerdotespurificatiet non purificatiuna cum leuitis
et cantatoribus,in intimumatriumbasilicaemaiorisuiri Iudaeipurificatistanteset orantessub diuo, si serenumesset, si tempestas,in porticusproximassese recipientes,in
exteriusatriummulieresIudae purificatae,in extremumatriumgentiles et Iudaeiqui
nuperuenerantex gentibususquead sextumpurificationisdiem.123
At the center was the court of the priests, reserved for them alone. It stood on
a higher level than the other courts since it was approached by a series of steps.
Next came the court reserved for purified Jewish men, followed in turn by the
court for purified Jewish women. The outermost court was open to Gentiles, or
to Jewish men returning from among the Gentiles but not yet fully purified.
In his image of the Tabernacle Cassiodorus's artist had ample space to depict,
in frontal perspective, the few objects present in the court (labrum and altar of
holocausts) and in the Tabernacle (candelabrum, table for the breads, altar of
incense, and Ark of the Covenant). One has only to enumerate the objects which,
according to Bede (who follows the text of Scripture), were present in the innermost court of the Temple (the brazen sea, the ten lavers, the bronze platform used
for the dedication, the great altar of holocausts)124 or in the Temple itself (the ten
candlesticks and ten tables for the bread, the hundred gold bowls, the altar of
incense, and the Ark of the Covenant)125to realize that it was manifestly impossible for these objects to be depicted within the restricted space that remained at
the center of the image containing the three concentric buildings surrounding the
Temple. Illustrating all these objects in frontal perspective would have demanded
a large bifolium all to itself. Bede, moreover, gives us a hint that these objects were
not present in Cassiodorus's Temple image. He had noted with some surprise that
in the Tabernacle image both altars, of holocausts and of incense, were depicted
with four feet.126Since similar altars were connected with the Temple, one might
have expected him to include a reference to these altars as well. But his comments
about the two altars (utrumque) having feet (pedes) are restricted to the Tabernacle
image, whereas his remark about the general layout applies to both images:
123 CCSL
119A, p. 193, 11.39-48.

If these objects were not shown in Cassiodorus's image, one almost gets the impression, from
reading Bede's description, that he had drawn his own plan of their layout: "Ingredientibusenim atrium
ab oriente primo diuertendum erat ad meridiem ubi mare in ipso angulo stabat ad lauandum sacerdotibus paratum, deinde progredientibus intro occurrebant luteres ad lauandas hostias ab utraque
parte positi, intra hos basis erat aenea quinque cubitorum longitudinis et quinque cubitorum latitudinis
et trium cubitorum altitudinis, in quo stans Salomon dedicabat templum; deinde ultra progredientibus
occurrebat altare holocausti contra meridiem atrii, deinde porticus templi siue uestibulum in quo erant
columnae aereae circa ostium templi" (CCSL 119A, p. 222, 11.1182-91).
125 2 Paral. 4.22:
"[fecit Salomon] mensas decem et posuit eas in Templo, quinque a dextris et quinque
a sinistris, fialas quoque aureas centum"; 3 Kings 7.49: "Et candelabra aurea quinque ad dexteram et
quinque ad sinistram contra oraculum." Bede discusses the placement of these objects and their allegorical importance in his De Templo.
124
126
See aboveat n. 91.
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859
. . in pictura[Tabernaculi]
Cassiodori . . in qua [pictura]etiamutriquealtariet holocausti uidelicetet incensipedes quattuorfecit quod utrumqueeum sicut et tabernaculi
et templipositionema doctoribusIudaeorumdidicisseputamus.127
I concludethat Cassiodorus'sTempleimagedid not show any altarsin the residual

view of a buildcentralspace.It probablysimplycontaineda (three-dimensional?)
main
the
since
its
focus-if
we accept
that
could
be
identified
as
itself,
Temple
ing
Bede'sstatements-was the elaboratelayoutof the threelong buildings,with their
courts,that surroundedthis Temple.
All this may explain why this image of the Templefrom the Codex Grandior
was not reproduced in Ceolfrith's new pandects. In his De Templo, after conclud-
ing his descriptionof the Templeimage,Bedemakesa significantcomment:
Haec quidemde structuratemplistudiosolectoricredidimusintimanda.Verumin eis

quaecumquescripturasacrareferrecommodumduxit figurasmysteriorumquaeramus
ceterispro historiaecognitionesimpliciterutamur.128
Only those details explicitly mentioned in Scripture, therefore, have any real spiritual value; only these can be explored on the allegorical level to uncover their
deeper meanings. What is not directly vouched for by God's word retains only
historical interest. Everything shown in the Tabernacle image had a textual basis
in the Book of Exodus and had in fact been so ordered made by God. Thus, for
Bede and his community, every detail of that image was replete with spiritual
meanings, fully expounded by Bede in his treatise on the Tabernacle. The Temple
image of the Codex Grandior, on the other hand, lacked all the objects (lavers,
altars, tables) described in the Bible and focused mainly on the three concentric
buildings with their courts, nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Bible.129In his De
Templo, moreover, Bede makes no attempt to draw any spiritual meanings from
this feature. His spiritual commentary rests entirely and exclusively on what he
can say about the Temple based on the words of Scripture. While we today might
view a plan presenting "historical knowledge" about the Temple as a useful adjunct to a Bible, it is doubtful that such a view would have been shared by the
Wearmouth-Jarrow community. Ceolfrith's pandects were destined to have an
127 CCSL
119A, pp. 81-82, 11.1565-70.
128CCSL
119A,p. 193,11.73-76. Thereis needfor a good studyof Bede'svastallegoricalenterprise.

CharlesPlummerin his introductionto the EcclesiasticalHistory (p. lix) wrote, "The allegorical
methodhas lost muchof its credit.To us it seemsan arbitraryand subjectiveprocesswhereanything
can be made to mean anythingaccordingto the fancy of the expositor."While it may be true that
allegoricalcommentariescontributelittle towardbiblicalstudiesin the strictestsense,enormousadvancesin literarystudiessincePlummer'sday haveopenedup new avenuesforappreciatingallegorical
commentaries-works indeedof imaginativeinvention-in theirown right.The bestshortintroduction to Bede'shermeneuticsavailableat presentis a chapteron his exegeticalworks by a scholarin
that field:GeorgeHardinBrown,Bede the Venerable(Boston,1987), pp. 42-61.
129GeorgeForestBrowne,acutelyawarethata buildingsurroundedby a tripleporticuslikethe one
Bededescribeswas unlikelyto representSolomon'sTemple,has this refreshingcomment:"Thisvery
'tripleporticus'... has no connectionwith Solomon'stemple,thoughBededescribesthe courtof the
Jews, the court of the women, and the court of the gentiles, and-speaking always of Solomon's
temple-says that in these porticoes Jeremiah and the prophets, our Lord and the apostles, preached
to the people. If all these things were really shown in a picture of Solomon's temple by Cassiodorus,
it is perhaps as well that the picture is lost"! The Academy, 5 May 1888, p. 308, col. 1.
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860
honored place in the monastic church-a building consecrated to liturgical worship, to prayer and meditation, and not to studious concerns. It is interesting that
Alcuin's Poem 69 (to be considered later), composed after he had seen one of
Ceolfrith's pandects, suggests that it contained an image of the Tabernacle but not
one of the Temple-thus lending further support to the view that the Temple
image of the Codex Grandior was not duplicated in Ceolfrith's Bibles.130The
Codex Amiatinus can, therefore, be considered to be as complete today as it was
when Ceolfrith departed with it in the early days of June, 716, for Rome.
7. THE ORIGINALORDER OF THE INTRODUCTORYLEAVES
IN THE CODEX GRANDIOR AND IN THE CODEX AMIATINUS
Before considering the prologus and the Ezra image, two elements of the Codex
Amiatinus having an undoubted Vivarium origin despite Cassiodorus's silence
about them, it will be useful to discuss the arrangement of the leaves at the opening
of the manuscript. These leaves display a double numbering, one in arabic, the
other in roman numerals. Diagram 1, with the earlier (eighteenth-century?)arabic
numbers, bears witness to a manifestly erroneous sequence, the result of some
rebinding. In this sequence the two leaves (numbered 2 and 7) forming the bifolium with the image of the Tabernacle were separated through the insertion of
other leaves, so that the two sides (2 verso and 7 recto) with the image could no
longer be seen together, side by side.131We know that when Peter Corssen examined the manuscript in April of 1887 this situation had been remedied, since
the leaves had been rearranged (Diagram 2) to allow the Tabernacle image to be
viewed as a single unit.132The set of roman numerals (I through VII) dates from
this "correction," which helps to explain the rather confusing mixture of arabic
and roman numerals used in more recent descriptions of these pages. We thus
presently have three bifolia, 1-8, II-III, V-VI, and two single leaves, IV and VII.
That these single leaves are no longer in their original position is proved by two
130
On Alcuin's poem see below, pp. 877-80.

This was the condition of the leaves when Garrucci wrote his description of the opening quire
of the Codex Amiatinus for volume 3 of his Storia della arte cristiana, p. 50: "La prima miniatura del
codice trovasi in parte alla pagina 2, in parte alla pagina 7, per isbaglio del moderno legatore del libro.
Essa rappresenta il recinto del tabernacolo ..." The decision to remedy this situation probably resulted
from Garrucci's intervention and publication.
132 See his
report published in The Academy for 30 April 1887 (no. 782), 309, col. 1: "The arrangement of the folios is important. Folios 1 and 8 are one piece [bifolium], 2 and 3 are one piece [bifolium],
mounted on a guard, not sewn in; 4 is a single page, on a guard, with 7 mounted on the same guard
and pasted on to the heel of 4; 5 and 6 are one piece [bifolium], and the sewing is here. The quaternion
is not fully caught in with the rest of the MS. in binding. Folio 1 is blank: 1 verso has the donation
verses: 2 is blank; 2v and 3 are filled with the picture of 'Solomon's Temple' [!]; 3v is blank: 4 has the
prologue, and 4v the contents: 5 has the picture of Ezra: 5v is blank: 6 has the 'Hieronymian' division
of Scripture; 6v is blank: 7 has the 'Hilarian and Epiphanian' division of Scripture: 7v has five circles
cross-wise in a larger circle, containing brief contents of the five books of the Pentateuch: 8 has the
'Augustinian' division of Scripture; 8v is blank, and looks like an outside." I am very grateful to Dr.
Allen Grieco of I Tatti, Florence, and Dr. Angela Dillon Bussi, acting director of the Laurenziana, who
together made a thorough examination of the opening pages of the Codex Amiatinus on 26 October
1995. Their examination fully agreed with the analysis of P. Corssen cited above.
131
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DIAGRAM 1.
Order of Leaves in 1876 (with Arabic Numbering).

1
/ recto
verso
blank
Dedication verses (with offset from 4, "Ezra"image)
/recto
verso
blank
Tabernacle(left side)
/recto
verso
Cassiodorus'sprologus [both sides purple]

Contents of Amiatinus;Poem about Jerome
(recto
verso
"Ezra"image
blank
/recto
verso
Jerome'sdivision of Scripture(headed by roundel with Lamb)

(blank, with offset from 8 recto)
_5
recto
verso
Septuagintadivision of Scripture(headed by roundel with Father)

Pentateuchcircles (with text from Jerome'sLetter 53)
recto
verso
Tabernacle(right side)
blank
/recto
verso
Augustine'sdivision of Scripture(headed by roundel with Dove)

blank
DIAGRAM2.
Present Order of Leaves, Dating from c. 1880 (with Roman Numbering).
- II
IV
recto
verso
blank
Dedication verses (with offset from V, "Ezra"image)
recto
verso
blank
/recto
verso
blank
/recto
verso
Cassiodorus'sprologus [both sides purple]

Contents of Amiatinus;Poem about Jerome
- V
recto
"Ezra" image
verso
blank
- VI
recto
verso
Jerome'sScripturedivision (headed by roundel with Lamb)

(blank, with offset of 8 recto)
/recto
verso
recto
verso
SeptuagintaScripturedivision (headed by roundel with Father)

Pentateuchcircles (with text from Jerome'sLetter 53)
Augustine'sScripturedivision (headed by roundel with Dove)
blank
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862
instances of offsets. The frame of the Ezra image (V recto) has left an imprint on
the verso of I, containing the dedication verses,133and the couplet written over the
image of the Dove on 8 recto has left an imprint on the blank verso of VI.134
Although the couplet presents the appearance of a somewhat later addition, it
must have been added to Amiatinus before Ceolfrith's departure for Rome, since
there is evidence to indicate that it was also present in one of Amiatinus's sister
Bibles (the Offa Bible), to be considered presently.135We thus have two bifolia, I8, V-VI, which we know were originally next to one another. The problem then
remains of finding the position of the two single leaves IV and VII and of the
bifolium, II-III,with the Tabernacle image.
The roundel at the top of the Jerome division of Scripture (VI) depicts a Lamb,
and that at the top of the Augustine division (8) a Dove. For some time there was
debate about the figure shown at the head of the Septuaginta division. A. M.
Bandini thought it might represent Pope Gregory-at the time Amiatinus was
considered Gregory's Bible. Later Garrucci opted for a female head, representing
Ecclesia. Corssen first accepted Bandini's Gregory, but after discussing the matter
with the Laurenziana's prefect he concluded that it had to be the Godhead and
that the three roundels together formed a Trinitarian sequence.136This now seems
to be the accepted interpretation, which would suggest that VII, the Septuaginta
division (roundel with Father), immediately preceded VI (Lamb) and 8 (Dove).
The question that next arises is whether IV, the purple leaf with the prologus on
its recto and the contents of Amiatinus on its verso, originally formed a bifolium
with VII. It is rather surprising that these two should be the only single leaves.
Considering that IV is purple, it could be argued that it required special preparation, especially if it had been dyed rather than painted purple; it would have
been more difficult to dye than to paint half of a bifolium.137Several writers have
133
Peter Corssen was the first to note that the frame of the Ezra image had left an offset on the page
containing Ceolfrith's dedication verses (The Academy, 7 April 1888, p. 240, col. 2). This can be
verified in any good photograph of this dedication page, for example, in plate VIII of Lowe's English
Uncial and in plate I of Bruce-Mitford, "The Art of the Codex Amiatinus." Bruce-Mitford, after
studying this dedication page closely, added a further important observation: the offsets from the Ezra
frame "seem to underlie the pink and blue arcade frame of the dedicatory verse.... [N]o slightest
trace of them appears on the surface of the arcading, which is only executed in a light wash, and might
be expected to retain some trace of the offset" (p. 8). This suggests, in other words, that some considerable time had passed between the painting of the Ezra image and the addition of the dedication, time
enough for the image-newly painted-to leave its imprint on the blank page opposite. Such a lapse
of time also agrees with Bede's report: "tres pandectes nouae translationis . . . ipse [Ceolfrith] super
adiungeret; quorum unum senex Romam rediens secum ... pro munere" (Historia abbatum 15, ed.
Plummer, p. 379)-thus implying that some time had elapsed between the making of the three new
pandects and Ceolfrith's departure with one of them for Rome.
134 First pointed out by G. F Browne in The Academy, 30 April 1887, p. 309, col. 1: "Folio 6v has
at one time been next to 8, for part of the couplet at the top of 8, 'Eloquium domino quaecumque
uolumina pandunt / Spiritus hoc sancto fudit ab ore deus' can be read on the face of 6, a considerable
part of the couplet being impressed, backwards, on 6v. This is due to the fact that this entry, unlike
any others in the MS., is formed by a profusion of thick black pigment, which has been silvered."
135 See the comments on this
couplet in Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 96-97.
136
See his letter of 28 March 1888 in The Academy, 7 April 1888, p. 240, cols. 2-3.
137
I find no comments on this point in the literature. Michelle Brown, Understanding Illuminated
Manuscripts (London, 1994), p. 104, writes that "In Mediterranean regions, murex purple (a shell-
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863
thought that these two leaves must originally have formed a bifolium. In favor of
this view one might quote the independent observations of P. Corssen and G. F
Browne that the leaf with the Septuaginta division appears smaller than the others,
a portion having been bent to allow it to be attached to a guard.138But if it did
at one time form a bifolium with the purple leaf, when were the leaves separated?
It is here that we need to consider the Pentateuch circles painted on the verso of
VII, the Septuaginta leaf.
This verso, painted a light ocher, displays a large purple circle (having quite a
different hue from that of the purple leaf), containing a series of five smaller yellow
circles, drawn so as together to form a cross.139In each of the smaller circles is
inscribed a statement about one of the books of the Pentateuch, taken from Jerome's well-known Letter 53 to Paulinus on the Bible.140There has been some
debate about whether this element of the Codex Amiatinus was copied from the
Codex Grandior.141I think that the weight of the evidence goes against such a
supposition.
As just noted, Jerome's letter was very well known. Bede praised it in the prologue to his commentary on Ezra, precisely because it contained such succinct
statements about the contents of each biblical book:
Eximiussacraeinterpresac doctorscripturaeHieronimuscum libroseiusdemscripturae
in epistola ad amicum breuiterpercurreretet quae in singulis continerenturstrictim
contingeret,"Ezras,"inquit ...142
Cassiodorus had likewise praised this letter, and for exactly the same reasons:
Is epistulamsuamad Paulinumex senatorepresbyterummirificumdestinavit,docens
quemammodumScripturasdivinasadhibitacautelaperlegeret,ubi brevitervirtutemuniuscuiusquelibriveteriset novi Testamentimirabiliterindicavit.'43
Cassiodorus then continues, perhaps mildly tongue in cheek, to say that he might
not have composed his Institutiones had he first encountered this letter of Jerome.
When he discovered it, his work was finished (opere iam confecto), and therefore-we need to add-so were his three pandects, which antedate the Institu-
fish dye) was often used, but in north-western Europe alternatives such as plant-dye folium (from the
turnsole, or crozophora tinctoria) seem to have been more frequently used." An analysis of the Amiatinus leaf is needed as well as a careful examination of all the initial pages for any further evidence of
offsets.
138 P. Corssen, The Academy, 7 April 1888, p. 240, col. 2: "f. 7 seems a trifle smaller, but this is only
because a portion of it is attached to the guard"; G. F. Browne, The Academy, 5 May 1888, p. 308,
col. 2: "The fact that 7 somewhat overlaps the heel of 4 made it impossible for me to determine
whether the two pieces fitted together accurately, as they would if they had originally been one piece
[a bifolium]." If someday the leaves could be detached and reexamined, Browne's suggestion would
be a good one to take up.
139 For a
reproduction see Bruce-Mitford, "The Art of the Codex Amiatinus," plate XII.
140 For the
printed text in these circles see Biblia Sacra, ed. Quentin, l:xxv.
141
Most recently, Corsano, "The First Quire," pp. 30-31, argues against the Codex Grandior as a
source, while Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 122-23, argues the opposite-but in both
cases, I think, the basis of their arguments is too narrow.
142 CCSL
119A, p. 237, 11.1-4.
(ed. Mynors, pp. 59-60).
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864
tiones.144 He notes that, unlike himself, Jerome was writing "for a reader untutored
in divine law" (ad divinae legis novum lectorem).145None of this suggests either
the circumstances or the tone of someone eager to extract nuggets from the newly
discovered Letter 53 and incorporate them within a circular design in his Codex
Grandior. As regards the design itself it should be noted that a similar large circle,
of about the same dimension as the one containing the smaller circles, forms the
frame for the image of Christ in Majesty on folio 796v of the Codex Amiatinus,
an image that no one considers borrowed from the Codex Grandior.146Again, a
similar large circle, with many smaller circle motifs used to create a border, forms
part of the diagram in the Gospel leaves bound with the Utrecht Psalter, leaves
considered to derive from Wearmouth-Jarrow.147Such a fondness for circles suggests that the design on folio VIIv of Amiatinus was probably invented there.
The original placement of this design remains a puzzle. Taken by itself, this
painted design seems intended as an opening to the Pentateuch, requiring a position introducing Genesis.148The recto side, on the other hand, has a natural position at the beginning of the Trinitarian sequence. Thus we get contradictory
impressions about placement, depending on which side of the leaf is in view. This
anomaly should alert us to the possibility than an orderly sequence of leaves, as
planned by Cassiodorus for his Codex Grandior, may not survive intact in Amiatinus. A sequence beginning with the Septuaginta division would certainly have
suited Cassiodorus's pandect with its uetus translatio, but it could not suit the
Codex Amiatinus, for which Jerome's Vulgate version had been adopted. But if
the Pentateuch circles were a creation of Wearmouth-Jarrow, why were they not
simply placed on the blank verso of the Augustine division (Dove), facing the
opening of Genesis? Perhaps the bifolium bearing the Septuaginta division was
cut in two so that this leaf could be moved to a new position, at the end of the
series. By altering Cassiodorus's original sequence the Jerome division (Lamb)
would acquire first place, immediately following on Bede's verses-to be considered below-which stress that Amiatinus was his Bible. I am prepared to think
that this is what happened, possibly at a later stage of the proceedings, and that
it was intended to underline Jerome's importance as the author of the Vulgate text.
With the removal of this leaf to its new position, the verso side became the obvious
place for inserting the Pentateuch circles, with their texts, also taken from Jerome,
intended to introduce the first books of the Old Testament.
Let us now consider the bifolium II-III, where the painting of the Tabernacle
144 This
point is stressedby Fischer,"CodexAmiatinus"(above,n. 23), p. 25: "Dasbedeutetaber,
daSfer den Briefnochnichtkannte,als er mit denInstitutionesbegann.Erkannteihnnochvielweniger,
als er vor den InstitutionesseinedreiBibelnschuf,die er zu Anfangder Institutionesbeschreibt."
145
If Cassiodorus had extracted statements from Jerome's letter in order to place them, like the
divisionsof Scripture,in his Codex Grandior,this would have been the obvious place for him to
mentionthis fact.
146 This will strike
anyonewho firstglancesat the two plates,XII and XIII,placedside by side in
Bruce-Mitford's
JarrowLecture("TheArt of the CodexAmiatinus").
147 Publishedas
plateVIII(2) by Bruce-Mitford,"TheArt of the CodexAmiatinus,"and by Lowe,
English Uncial, plate XI.
148 The circle
enclosingthe imageof Christin Majesty,on fol. 796v, is also on a versoandfacesthe
openingof the New Testament.
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DIAGRAM3.
SuggestedOriginal Order in the Codex Grandior.

/recto
verso
recto
verso
[blank]
[blank]
recto
verso
[blank]
Temple (left side)
recto
verso
recto
verso
Temple (right side)

[blank]
blank
blank
recto
verso
Cassiodorusportrait
blank
recto
verso
Cassiodorus'sprologus
blank
recto
verso
SeptuagintaScripturedivision (roundelwith Father)

blank
recto
verso
Jerome'sScripturedivision (roundelwith Lamb)

blank
recto
verso
Augustine'sScripturedivision (roundelwith Dove)

blank
DIAGRAM4.
SuggestedOriginal Order in the Codex Amiatinus.

- II
/recto
verso
- II
/recto
verso
- V
/recto
[blank]
[blank]
[blank]
verso
Ceolfrith'sdedication verses [with offset from Ezra frame]
recto
"Ezra" image
verso
[blank]
Cassiodorus'sprologus
Contents of Amiatinus;Poem on Jerome
/ recto
- VI
/recto
\ verso
verso
Jerome'sdivision of Scripture(roundelwith Lamb)

[blank, with offset from 8 recto]
-8
recto
verso
Augustine'sdivision of Scripture(roundelwith Dove)

blank
VII
recto
verso
Septuagintadivision of Scripture(roundelwith Father)

Pentateuchcircles with text from Jerome'sLetter 53
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866
and its court occupy the two inside pages. In determining the original position of
this bifolium we need to remember that the Codex Grandior contained two such
large images, one of the Tabernacle and one of the Temple. Cassiodorus tells us
that he placed these images in capite of his pandect.l49 Did he mean "ahead of
everything else" or simply "in the opening section"? Note the use of this same
expression in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith (c. 37), "habens in capite scriptos
huiusmodi uersiculos," where it certainly means that the dedication verses stood
at the very beginning of Amiatinus. Cassiodorus's images presumably also occupied the inside pages of two bifolia. For this reason a position at the actual beginning of the book would have been appropriate, especially since-in that position-less distortion to the images would occur when the bifolia were opened
to be viewed. Given such an arrangement in the Codex Grandior, there is no
compelling reason to think that the present Tabernacle bifolium II-IIIhad to be
inserted within a sequence of leaves I to 8.150It probably stood outside the other
introductory material contained in the first eight pages of the Codex Amiatinus.
All this therefore suggests that the original sequence of the Codex Grandior
could be reconstructed as illustrated in Diagram 3. This sequence-except for the
Temple plan-would then have been followed originally in Amiatinus (and its
sister pandects?) but later modified in Amiatinus by the removal of VII to a final
position after 8, as shown in Diagram 4.
8. THE PURPLELEAFWITHTHE PROLOGUSAND
THE CONTENTSOF THE CODEX AMIATINUS
We can now turn to the prologus (fol. 4r), written under a double arch in gold
letters on a leaf stained purple. While we have no way of knowing whether any
elements of the Amiatinus decoration reflect that of the model, there can be little
doubt that this is the prologue Cassiodorus composed for his Codex Grandior. It
reads:
Si diuino, ut dignum est, amore flammati ad ueram cupimus sapientiam peruenire et
in hac uita fragili aeterni saeculi desideramus imaginem contueri, Patrem luminum deprecemur ut nobis cor mundum tribuat, actionem bonae uoluntatis inpertiat, perseuerantiam sua uirtute concedat, ut Scripturarum diuinarum palatia, ipsius misericordia
149See
above, n. 42.
150 In the course of
the Academydiscussionson Amiatinusat the end of the last century,J. F A.

Hortmadea similarsuggestion:"Itis of courseimpossibleto saywhetherCeolfridcausedbothpictures
to be copied,or onlythat of the Tabernacle;
antecedentlyone wouldscarcelyexpecthimto be satisfied
with one alone. On the formersuppositionthe AmiatineTemplemust at some unknowntime have
been lost. On the same supposition,while the AmiatineTempleexisted,it could hardlyfindplace in
the extantpreliminaryquire;for the two picturescould not both be in the middle,the only placein
which both pagesof eithercould be seen together,the quirebeingassumedto be foldedin the usual
way, sheetwithinsheet.Unlessthen, by an arrangementtoo clumsyto be probable,the Templewere
parasiticallystitchedin betweenthe Tabernacleand the adjoiningsheet,it musthave stood independently outsidethe quire.In a formerletter,I hintedthat the extantpicturemightconceivablyhave
been independentof the quire;and if therewas a Templepicturelikewise,it is morelikelythat both
pictureswould be independentof the quirethan that one would be within it and one without"(The
Academy, 19 January 1889, p. 42, col. 3).
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867
largiente,possimusfiducialiterintroire,ne nobis dicatur:quaretu enarrasiustitiasmeas

et adsumistestamentummeumper os tuum [Ps.49.16]. Sed inuitatiillud potius audiamus, uenitead me omnesqui laboratiset oneratiestis,et ego uos reficiam[Matt.11.28].
Magnum munus, inaestimabilebeneficium,audire hominemsecretaDei, et quemadmodum ad ipsum ueniaturinstitui. Festinemusitaque fratresad animarumfontem
uiuum,salutariaremediaiussionum.Quisquisenimin terrisscripturistalibusoccupatur,
paenecaelestisiam regnisuauitateperfruitur.
Nec uos moueatquodpaterAugustinusin septuagintaunumlibrostestamentumuetus
nouumquediuisit,doctissimusautemHieronymusidem uetus nouumquetestamentum
XLVIIIIsectionibuscomprehendit,in hoc autem corporeutrumquetestamentumseptuagenario numero probatur impletum, in illa palmarum quantitate forsitan praesagatus,
quas in mansione helim inuenit populus hebraeorum; nam licet haec calculo disparia
uideantur,doctrinatamenpatrumad instructionemcaelestisecclesiaeconcorditeruniuersaperducunt.Amen.151
The reference to the seventy palm trees of Helim shows us that this prologue was
written for a Bible divided into seventy books, a number corresponding, according
to the Institutiones, to the Septuaginta division contained in the Codex Grandior.152When we look at the language of the prologue, we find that it "points
dramatically to Cassiodorus."153The use of in hoc autem corpore shows someone
very familiar with oc6ouaand aogDattov to designate a codex.154The expression
may have seemed a little odd to the Northumbrian community copying this text.
On the verso of this same leaf, where they listed the contents of Amiatinus, they
used the more familiar in hoc codice continentur.s55 The phrase "Scripturarum
diuinarum palatia" has a definite Cassiodorian ring. References to palaces abound
in the letters (Variae) of King Theoderic's former minister. It would therefore have
come naturally to him to transpose this notion to another plane and so, for example, to write "Nunc claues psalmorum reserabiles apponamus, ut, praestante
Domino, Regis nostri palatia introire mereamur" (on Psalm 1) and "Dicta enim
illorum Domini constat esse palatia, quando ipse in eis inuenitur, si deuota mente
perquiritur" (on Psalm
99).156
There is no echo of this "palatial" terminology
anywhere in Bede. We can also juxtapose the phrase "Festinemus itaque fratres
151
Biblia Sacra, ed. Quentin, l:xxi-xxii.
152
See aboveat nn. 73-74.
Corsano, "The First Quire," p. 11. On p. 12, n. 37, she cites a number of parallels linking the
language of the prologue with that of the Institutiones.
154 See these words in G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), p. 1366 (vi) and
p. 1367; also E. A. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (New York, 1887),
p. 1065. I am grateful to Michael McCormick for pointing out this Greek usage to me. The Oxford
Latin Dictionary, s.v. corpus (p. 449, no. 16), has "a compendium of scientific, literary, or other
writings," and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, fasc. II.C (p. 498, no. 12),
quotes from Aldhelm: "quemadmodum B. Augustinus per multa librorum corpora ... fecisse comprobatur," and "per omne corpus poeticorum librorum." But samples simply equating corpus with
codex, as in the Greek, seem lacking in the Latin sources.
155 Alcuin, whose Poem 69-as
we shall see-was inspired by seeing one of the sister pandects of
Amiatinus, and who had read the prologue, used corpus but felt the need to qualify the word in some
manner: (v. 27) "Continet iste uno sancto sub corpore codex"; (v. 83) "quisque legat huius sacrato in
corpore libri."
156 CCSL
97, p. 28, 11.38-40; CCSL 98, p. 889, 11.91-93.
153
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868
ad ... salutaria remedia iussionum" with Cassiodorus's "multiplicem medicinam

dignaris ingerere iussionum" from his comments on Psalm 47.157 His frequent use
of calculo ("licet haec calculo disparia uideantur") to indicate "calculation"158
contrasts with Bede's exclusive use of this form of the word to mean "stone."159
The whole vocabulary of the prologus is that of Cassiodorus, and we have no
reason to doubt that it was faithfully copied, without alteration, from the Codex
Grandior into the Codex Amiatinus. But again we must remember that the
Wearmouth-Jarrow community did not know whose prologue they were copying.
Knowing nothing of Cassiodorus's foundation at Vivarium, they must have wondered who was addressing his brethren in such moving terms (Festinemus fratres
..). It was their reverence for the antiquity of the old pandect (ab antiquis formata) that prompted them to preserve so many of its features, including this prologue, intact.
When we pass from the recto of the leaf that contains the prologus to its verso,
we leave the world of Cassiodorus for that of Wearmouth-Jarrow and Bede.160
This page-purple like the recto-makes a statement, namely, that the contents
of the Codex Amiatinus represent Jerome's version of the Bible. The title, "In hoc
codice continentur Veteris et Novi Testamenti libri LXXI," is written in rustic
capitals across both columns and is followed by the list of Old Testament books
in the left-hand column and New Testament texts in the right-hand columnboth lists appearing in the same uncial script used for the prologus on the recto
of the folio. Near the bottom of the page, again in rustic capitals and divided
between the two columns, come some verses:
Hieronyme,interpresuariisdoctissimelinguis,
Te Bethlemcelebrat,te totus personatorbis,
Te quoquenostratuis prometbibliothecalibris,
Qua noua cum prisciscondisdonariagazis.161
157
CCSL 97, p. 431, 11.249-50.
The form calculo, exclusivelydesignatinga calculation,occursfourteentimes in Cassiodorus

(CLCLT).
159The form calculooccursfive timesin Bede(CLCLT)
and alwaysmeansa stone.
160 For a
reproductionof this side, see Bruce-Mitford,"TheArtof the CodexAmiatinus,"plateVI.
A strikingandpuzzlingfeatureof the design,on boththe rectoandversoof thisfolio, is theappearance
of what look like two sides of a sharplypointedtriangleon eitherside of the doublearchat the top
of the page. Queriedaboutthis feature,my friendDr.Nancy Netzerrepliedthat she had beenunable
to come up with an exact parallel,but she did find an interestingpage (fol. 4a) amongthe pagesof
the Greekcanon table in Vienna,NationalbibliothekMS 847, whereinsteadof a doublearchat the
top thereis an archon the left side with two sidesof a triangleon the right:see CarlNordenfalk,Die
spdtantikenKanontafeln,Tafelband(Goteborg,1938), Taf. 44. It may be worth notingthat Vienna
MS 847, of the fifthcentury,has beenlinkedwith Ravenna:seeE. A. Lowe,CodicesLatiniantiquiores,
10 (Oxford,1963), no. 1491.
161 Citedin
White,"TheCodexAmiatinus,"p. 291, andCorsano,"TheFirstQuire,"p. 14. I translate
thus:
158
You,O Jerome,translatormost learnedin diverselanguages,

You Bethlehemcelebrates,you the whole world sings;
Our library,too, will exalt you in your books,
Throughwhichyou createnew gifts fromold treasures.
In tributeto Jerome,the agencyof Wearmouth-Jarrow's
scriptoriumin the productionof his "new
gift"(donarium)is tactfullysuppressed.
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869
To get these verses in perspective we should begin by looking at Bede's account

of Ceolfrith's departure for Rome, chronicled in chapter 66 of his De temporum
ratione:
His temporibusmulti Anglorumgentis nobiles et ignobiles,uiri et feminae,duces et
priuati,diuiniamorisinstinctude BrittaniaRomanuenireconsueuerant.Interquosetiam
reuerentissimusabba meus Ceolfridusannos natus LXXIII,cum esset presbiterannos
XLVII,abbasautemannosXXXV,ubi Lingonasperuenit,ibi defunctusatquein ecclesia
beatorumgeminorummartyrumsepultusest. Qui inter alia donaria,quae adferredisposuerat,misit ecclesiaesancti Petripandectema beato Hieronimoin Latinumex Hebreo uel Graecofonte translatum.162
Isidore had written some short verses celebrating in very general terms the authors whose books were in his library.163The first three verses quoted above repeat
his tribute to Jerome.164The fourth line, added at Wearmouth-Jarrow,transformed
the tone of the poem into one specifically meant to fit the Codex Amiatinus, the
pandectem a beato Hieronimo in Latinum ex Hebreo uel Graeco fonte translatum.
To achieve this the author simply borrowed one line from Isidore's couplet about
his own Bible but altered the meaning of the words:
Hic geminaeradiantuenerandauoluminalegis;
Conditasunt pariterhic noua cum ueteri.l65
In this couplet noua/ueteri stand for the Old and New Testaments. But in the
Amiatinus line it is Jerome's books (priscisgazis) present in the Wearmouth-Jarrow
library that allow him to make (condis) new gifts (noua donaria), to be taken to
Rome for presentation to St. Peter.We know that Bede was familiar with Isidore's
verses since he cites the first two lines on Jerome, with a certain gusto, in his letter
to Plegwin:
Miranturaliqui quaretantus tamqueegregiusSanctaeinterpresScripturaeHieronimus, de quo dictumet iuredictumest: Hieronime,interpresuariisdoctissimelinguis,te
Bethleemcelebrat,te totuspersonatorbis,quare,inquam,nolueritille cumlibrumtransferretChronicorum,quod uerumab Hebraeisdidicerat,hoc etiamtradereLatinis?166
As already noted, the Codex Amiatinus was probably commissioned from the
outset by Ceolfrith to be used as a gift volume on some future occasion.167It is
my own impression that the verses on Jerome were specifically crafted for insertion
in this "gift" pandect, and I am led to wonder whether it was not Bede himself
who wrote them on this page. He tells us elsewhere that he had the skills of a
162
CCSL 123B, p. 534.

See Charles Henry Beeson, Isidor-Studien (Munich, 1913), pp. 157-63.
164
Beeson, Isidor-Studien, p. 160. Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, pp. 104-5, suggests
that the Amiatinus verses were copied from the Codex Grandior. But Corsano ("The First Quire," p.
14) points out, "as Cassiodorus died some time before Isidore composed these lines, we have here
verses which could not possibly have stood in the Grandior." Moreover, their very position on this
folio, following the list of contents of Amiatinus, argues against any borrowing from the Codex Grandior.
165
Beeson, Isidor-Studien, p. 157.
166 CCSL
123C, pp. 622-23, 11.201-6.
167 See
above, n. 57.
163
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870
scribe,sinceon occasionhe actednot only as dictatorbut also as his own notarius

et librarius-terms that suggestan abilityto use a hierarchyof scripts(for titles,
etc.) in preparinga book.168The scriptof the poem celebratingJeromeappearsa
little cramped,is irregularin spacing (includingheight and width of the letters),
and does not have quite the same professionallook as the heading,in the same
script, at the head of the columns. The verses may well representa last-minute
insertionmade to underlinethe fact that the Bible Ceolfrithwas taking as a gift
(donarium)to Romewas the pandectema beatoHieronimoin Latinumex Hebreo
uel Graecofonte translatum.
9. THE EZRA IMAGEIN THE CODEX AMIATINUS
That the image of Ezra, taken as a whole, cannot be the inventionof Wearmouth-Jarrowartistsis sufficientlyproved by severalof its features.In the first
place we have the mannerin which the scribalinstrumentsare scatteredaround
on the floor in front of the seated figure (Fig. 5).169 This manner of displaying the
tools of a particulartradeor occupationis characteristicof classicalRomanand

late-antiqueart,well documentedthroughfunerarysteles,mosaics,andpaintings,
for example, the fourth-century representation of the gravedigger Diogenes in the
Roman catacombs of Domitilla, who is shown with all the instruments of his
calling scattered about him (Fig. 6).170 This type of representation is totally absent
See his prologueto the commentaryon Luke:CCSL120, p. 7, 1. 96.
clarityI again borrowthe design (Fig.5) made for Garrucci'sStoriadella arte
cristiana,tav. 126, 1 (Ezra).This designmade no attemptto decipherthe titles on the spinesof the
volumes(see below,n. 171). Forcolor reproductionsof this pagesee, amongothers,KurtWeitzmann,
168
169 For the sake of
Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (New York, 1977), plate 48; David M. Wilson,
Anglo-Saxon Art: From the Seventh Century to the Norman Conquest (New York, 1984), illus. 39;
George Henderson, From Durrow to Kells: The Insular Gospel-Books, 650-800 (London, 1987), p.
118 (illus.171). Forrecentdiscussionsof this imageseeJiirgenMerten,"DieEsra-Miniatur

des Codex
Amiatinus: Zu Autorenbild und Schreibgerat," Trierer Zeitschrift 50 (1987), 301-19,
and George
Henderson'scriticismof Corsano'streatment("TheFirstQuire,"pp. 15-22) in "Cassiodorusand

Eadfrith Once Again," in The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and
Ireland,ed. R. MichaelSpearmanandJohnHiggitt(Edinburgh,1993), pp. 82-91. Fortheconnection

betweenthe imageof Ezrain Amiatinusand that of Matthewin the LindisfarneGospelssee below,
pp. 880-81.
170 I againthankCecileEversfor providingme with
bibliographicinformationon this topic. Fig. 6
is borrowedfrom Garrucci,Storiadella arte cristiana,tav. 41, 1 (descriptionin text vol. 2, pp. 5051). The Romanswere fond of depictingthe tools of a person'strade on funerealmonuments:see
GerhardZimmer,RomischeBerufsdarstellung
(Berlin,1982). Intellectualas wellas manuallaborcould
be signifiedby sucha display.A late-fifth-century
diptychfromMonzashows a poet accompaniedby
his Muse; at the poet's feet lie a scroll and a wax tablet:see Milano, capitaledell'imperoromano,
286-402 d.c. (Milan,1990), pp. 341-42, illus. 311. Of evengreaterinterestfor comparisonwith the
Cassiodorusimageof the Codex Grandior(as reflectedin Amiatinus)is the paintingin the hypogeum
of TrebiusJustusdiscoveredin 1911. Trebius-who had died in his twenty-secondyear-is shown
seatedsurroundedby objectsthat includeroll, codex, wax tablets,stylus,andinkwell,butin thiscase
these humbleimplementspoint to higherthings.See CarlaCasalone,"Note sulle pitturedell'ipogeo
di Trebio Giusto a Roma," Cahiers archeologiques 12 (1962), 62: ". . . la stessa immagine di Trebio
Giustoche ci rappresentail defuntocome una personacolta, attorniatoda tutti gli oggettiche erano
connessialle attivitaintelletualidella letturae della scrittura...." This providesus with the cultural
backgroundfor the Cassiodorusportrait,wherethe tools of the writingtradeat his feetindicatemuch
moresophisticateduse of the literaryart than would be the case with a simplescribe.
on Sat, 16 May 2015 04:20:25 UTC
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Fig. 5. Codex Amiatinus: Ezra (see n. 169).
on Sat, 16 May 2015 04:20:25 UTC
Fig. 6. Diogenes
872
from Insular art, and its presence in the Codex Amiatinus implies that a model of
Mediterranean origin was being very faithfully reproduced.
The figure of Ezra, an Old Testament figure, placed in front of a cupboard
containing nine volumes, with indications that these volumes represent the Old
and New Testaments, is clearly an anomaly.171 While the cupboard itself (with its
erroneous perspective of the open doors) recalls the cupboard with Gospel books
(with a similar faulty perspective) in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia,172the nine
volumes lying in the cupboard point only in a single direction, namely, to Vivarium
and Cassiodorus's Institutiones.173While for us the nine volumes unmistakably
connect this image with Cassiodorus, they have no such specific relevance, however, for Ezra. There is nothing in Cassiodorus's works to suggest that he considered Ezra a pivotal figure, deserving the high attention this Old Testament personality receives in Amiatinus. How, then, are we to interpret this image?
We may begin by recalling once more a fact stressed many times in the foregoing
pages. When Ceolfrith returned to Northumbria, bearing the old pandect he had
acquired in Rome, he did not really know whose Bible he possessed. And even
after it had been determined that the two images, of the Tabernacle and the Temple, had been inserted by Cassiodorus, it was still not obvious that the senator
was inserting these in a codex he had himself caused to be made rather than in an
old pandect already in his possession. From the original position of the Ezra image
in Amiatinus we can deduce that the Codex Grandior opened with a somewhat
similar image, and we can even guess fairly easily whose image it displayed. It was
a portrait, without title, showing Cassiodorus at work, possibly on his Codex
Grandior, with the "smaller" pandect lying at his feet, and in close proximity to
his most precious legacy to his community, the nine volumes containing the books
of the Bible together with commentaries.174He seems almost to invoke this image
in his introduction to the Institutiones:
171
Garrucci'sartistomittedthe titles fromthe spinesof the books displayedin the cupboard,andI
have madeno attemptto add themin Fig. 6. The essentialpoint-which no one disputes,andwhich
is centralto the presentarticle-is that they coveredboth the Old and New Testaments.For a very
recentdiscussionof thesetitles-now difficultto read-see R. Marsden,"Jobin His Place:The Ezra
49 (1995), 3-15. Marsden(p. 14) concedesthat"we
Miniaturein the CodexAmiatinus,"Scriptorium
cannoteven be surethat they [theNorthumbrians]
did not makealterations,accidentalor otherwise,
in copyingthe miniatureand, specifically,the titles on the spinesof the books."
172 For a
reproductionand discussionof the contentsof this imagesee P. Courcelle,"Legrilde saint
Laurentau mausoleede GallaPlacidia,"Cahiersarcheologiques3 (1948), 29-39. In trueperspective
the upperandloweredgesof the cupboarddoorsshouldbe slantingupward,not downward.A perusal
of the illustrationsin vol. 3 of ErwinR. Goodenough,JewishSymbolsin the Greco-RomanPeriod
(New York,1953), shows someTorahshrineswith opendoorsthathavea "correct"perspective(e.g.,
968, 974), othersa "faulty"one (e.g.,967). Inabilityto handleperspectivecorrectlymaymerelyreflect
a periodof decliningartisticstandards.
173 I remainpersuadedthat if Cassiodorus's
Institutioneshad been presentat Wearmouth-Jarrow,
sufficientclueswouldhavebeendiscoveredthereto identifythe seatedfigureportrayedat the opening
of the Codex Grandior.
174 Merten,"Die Esra-Miniatur," 318: "Die
p.
Frage,ob Cassiodoroder Esradargestelltsei, durch
die Konstruktionauflosenzu wollen, 'Cassiodorsei als Esra' [Fischer]dargestelltoder es sei 'not
zu sehen,erscheint
primarilyEsra,but essentiallyCassiodorusin the guise of Esra'[Bruce-Mitford]
Auchfur den Erklarungsversuch,
derKopistdes CodexAmiatinushabedas Cassiouberinterpretiert.
dor-Bildaus dem Codex grandior'zu einem Esra-Bildumgewandelt'[Schneemelcher],
gibt es keine
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873
quos ego cunctosnovemcodicesauctoritatisdivinae,ut senexpotui, sub collationepriscorum codicumamicis ante me legentibussedulalectionetransivi;ubi multumme laborasse Domino iuvante profiteor....175
Let us remember that we are not here in the monastic era dominated by the
ethos of St. Benedict's rule. There is no evidence that Cassiodorus, having retired
from the world to lead a more devout life-in the terminology of the period,
having become a conuersus-had himself also become a monk in one of his two
monasteries. Although his Institutiones is full of allusions to monks and gives the
names of the abbots of his two monasteries, nowhere does Cassiodorus include
himself in their number, as Andre van de Vyver has judiciously pointed out. The
"seigneur de Squillace" speaks of "his" monasteries and "his" monks.176The portrait of such a man would differ little from that of Pope Agapetus shown seated
among his books in the family home he had transformed into a library177-a
library,moreover, with which Cassiodorus was probably familiar. Let us also recall
the portraits of himself and of his parents that Gregory the Great caused to be
painted in the family home on the Caelian Hill which he transformed into a monastery.178
The stage is now set for continuing our story. When the old pandect with the
uetus translatio reached Northumbria, the image of the "scribe" seated in front
of the cupboard with nine volumes representing the Old and New Testaments was
bound to become an enigma for the Wearmouth-Jarrow community. It was obviously an image of importance, opening and inaugurating the Codex Grandior,
but what was its meaning? It was no doubt very attentively scrutinized. Viewed
solely in its relationship to the Old Testament, it may have evoked Ezra's name,
since he was reputed to have rewritten the Old Testament's lost books, and evidence to confirm such an interpretation could have been sought and found. Here
we are at a disadvantage, no longer being able to consult the original directly and
thus to determine the type of script displayed on the pages of the large open book
in which the "scribe" was writing. This may have been the element that set the
metamorphosis into motion, a process in which Bede's practical detective flair
possibly played some part. In the Amiatinus image, of which the best close-up is
the plate in Rupert Bruce-Mitford'sJarrow Lecture of 1967, what we see resembles
Tyronian notation.179If the Codex Grandior displayed something similar, or at
least jottings not immediately decipherable as recognizable letters by the community of Wearmouth-Jarrow, we probably have the clue we need. In the Old
I hopethatthe argumentspresentedherewill helpto showthatthesuspicion
stichhaltigenArgumente."
W. Schneemelcher
voiced in Reallexikonfur Antikeund Christentum,6 (Stuttgart,1966), col. 611,
was correct.
175 Institutiones,
"Praefatio"8 (ed. Mynors,p. 8).
176See van de Vyver'sdiscussionof Cassiodorus's
"conversion"in "Cassiodoreet son oeuvre,"pp.
253-63, and in "LesInstitutionesde Cassiodore,"pp. 80-82.
177 The existenceof this portraitis suggestedby the inscriptionstill preservedin the Einsiedeln
sylloge:see O'Donnell,Cassiodorus,pp. 182-84; also Henderson,"Cassiodorusand Eadfrith,"pp.
85-86.
178 On this
portraitsee P. Meyvaert,Bede and Gregorythe Great,JarrowLecture,1964 (Jarrow,
Eng., 1964), pp. 3-5 (repr.in Benedict,Gregory,Bedeand Others[London,1977]).
179Bruce-Mitford,
"TheArt of the CodexAmiatinus,"plateIV,2.
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874
Testament book that bears his name, Ezra is eight times referred to as scriba and
once as scriba uelox in lege Mosi (Ezra 7.6). Bede has an interesting comment on
the word uelox in his Thirty Questions on Kings:
Vastatanamquea ChaldaeisIudaeaet bibliotheca[estom.?]antiquituscongregatainter
alias prouinciaeopes hostili igne consumptaex qua pauci qui nunc in sanctascriptura
continenturlibri postmodumEzrae pontificis et proph~taesunt industriarestaurati.
Vndescriptumest de eo, "AscenditEzrasde Babiloneet ipsescribauelox in legeMoysi,"
uelox uidelicetquiapromptioreslitterarumfigurasquameatenusHebraeihabebantrepperit....180
In his commentary on Ezra Bede repeats this information about a special script:
Scribaautemuelox in lege Moysi appellaturEzraseo quod legemquaeeratconsumpta
reficeretnon solum legem sed etiam ut communismaiorumfama est omnem sacrae
scripturaeseriemquaepariterigniconsumptaest proutsibiuidebaturlegentibussufficere
rescripsit.... FeruntquoqueHebraeinequeapud eos de hac re ulla dubitatioest quod
idem Ezrasleuioreslitterasexcogitaueritsub nominibusearumquaseatenushabuerant
quibusuelocissimetantamlibrorumcopiamquae eratconsumptareficeret.181
Ezra, in other words, had invented a shorthand form of writing, which enabled
him to restore more rapidly (uelocissime) all the Hebrew writings that had been
destroyed. The story of the rewriting of the Hebrew books is told in the noncanonical 4 Ezra,182and we get some echoes of this tradition in the patristic literature, for example, in Jerome and Isidore.183The story of a special script must go
back directly to 4 Ezra, however, since it is not found in the Latin writers just
mentioned. Bede's allusion to the communis maiorum fama for this story is interesting since we know from Gildas that 4 Ezra circulated in Britain.184Whatever
the element that set the thought process going, Bede's community concluded that
the seated scribe of the Codex Grandior must be Ezra (seen as typus Christi). Care
180 CCSL
119, pp. 301-2, no. VII,11.17-24; this editioninsertsan est in the firstline afterbibliotheca,which I believeshould be omittedsincewe seem to have two ablativeabsolutes(uastataand
consumpta).
181
CCSL119A, pp. 307-8, 11.791-96, 813-17.
182 4 Ezra14.22-44. Hereit is not Ezrahimselfbut fivescribeschosen
by himwho, at his dictation
(or fromhis shorthandnotes?),restorethe lost books of the Hebrews.Note the referenceto "special"
signsor characters(notis)beingused:"Altissimusautemdeditintellectumquinqueuiris,et scripserunt
quae dicebanturex successionenotis quas non sciebant,et sederuntquadragintadiebus:ipsi autem
per diemscribebantet nocte manducabantpanem:ego [Ezras]autemper diemloquebaret noctenon
tacebam.Scriptisuntin quadragintadiebuslibrinongentiquattuor"(42, 45; citedfromthe editionby
J. ArmitageRobinson,Textsand Studies,3/2 [Cambridge,Eng., 1895], p. 72). I am verygratefulto
Dom MauriceBogaert,a well-knownspecialistin ancientLatinbiblicalliterature,for guidingme to
this noncanonicalsource.
183 SeeRobinson's
introduction,pp. xxxvi-xxxviii.Isidore(Etymologies6.3.2)writes:"Bibliothecam
VeterisTestamentiEsdrasscribapost incensamLegema Chaldaeis,dum Iudaeiregressifuissentin
Hierusalem,diuinoafflatuSpiritureparauit,cunctaqueLegiset Prophetarumuoluminaquaefuerant
a gentibuscorruptacorrexit,totumqueVetusTestamentum
in uigintiduoslibrosconstituit,ut tot libri
essentin Legequot habebanturet litterae."This is repeatedalmostverbatimin Isidore'sDe ecclesiasticis officiis1.12.3 (CCSL113, p. 12).
184 See Gildas,De excidio Britanniae60, ed.
Hugh Williams,pt. 1 (London,1899), pp. 133-41.
The quotationin Gildas is from 4 Ezra 15.22-27 and does not involve the story concerningthe
rewritingof Hebrewbooks.
on Sat, 16 May 2015 04:20:25 UTC
875
was thereforetaken to make this more obviouswhen the imagefrom the ancient
Biblewas reproducedfor insertioninto the new pandectscommissionedby Ceolfrith. To make sure that the scribauelox would be identifiedas Ezrahe was endowed with the appropriateinsignia.
These insigniaare crucialfor demonstratingthat at least the Ezracomponent
of the image, as it now stands in the Codex Amiatinus, is an invention of
since they identifiedEzranot only as scribauelox et sacerdos
Wearmouth-Jarrow,
but also as high priest,or pontifex.185It has sometimesbeen suggestedthat Cassiodorusmight have wished to representhimselfunderthe guise of Ezra.Had he
done so we can be surehe would neverhave chosento makeEzraa high priest!186
The only patristicor early-medievalwriterwho calls Ezrapontifexis Bede,in that
early work, the Thirty Questions on Kings, cited above in connectionwith the
The canonicalBook of Ezra(comprisingour 1 and
picturaab antiquisformata.187
2 Ezra) alludes only to Ezra as sacerdosor scriba.Jerome,in a passage of his
commentaryon Daniel, states that Iosedec was the high priest in Ezra'sday:
". .. post quos Ezraset Neemias,de Babyloneuenientes,murosurbisextruxerunt,
At the time of his
tenentepontificatumIoacimfilio Iesu cognomentoIosedec."188
of
this
Bede
was
unaware
to
Nothelm
passage.His authorityfor
obviously
reply
have
Ezra
can
been
3 Ezra since here alone
only
naming
high priest (pontifex)
among the Latin sources is Ezra referred to as pontifex three times.189Almost
certainly Bede's source for these references was Cassiodorus's Codex Grandior
with its Septuaginta version, where Ezra was divided into two books, Ezra A' (our
3 Ezra) and Ezra B' (our 1 and 2 Ezra).190It probably took some time for the
Wearmouth-Jarrow community (including Bede) to sort out the complications of
the books of Ezra. The Vulgate or Jerome's version contained only one book,
divided into Ezra (1 Ezra) and Nehemias (2 Ezra). This is the version we find in
See the text cited above,p. 874 (Ezraepontificiset prophetae).
Roth ("JewishAntecedentsof ChristianArt,"p. 40, n. 2) was convincedthatnothingin the Ezra
imagecould indicatea Jewishhigh priest"sinceEzranotoriouslydid not fill, or even qualifyfor that
dignity."Ezrawas traditionallyshown,likethe otherprophets,standing,withoutinsignia,andholding
a scrollor a book. He is thus seenreadingfroma scrollin the Synagogueimageat Dura-Europos:
see
Hans-PeterStahli,AntikeSynagogenkunst
(Stuttgart,1988), p. 94. In the SyriacBibleof Paris(reproducedin Weitzmann,LateAntiqueand EarlyChristianBook Illumination,p. 18, illus. XII)he holds
a book. In his commentaryon plate 48 (the AmiatinusEzra)Weitzmannsuggeststhat Cassiodorus
intendedto representhimself underthe guize of Ezra.The very fact that the figurein the Codex
Grandior(fromwhich the Amiatinusimagewas borrowed)was shown seatedindicatesit was never
intendedto functionas Ezra.
187 On the earlydate of the ThirtyQuestionssee above,n. 36. I havebeenunableto traceany other
independentreferenceto Ezraas pontifex.A verification,usingthe Chadwyck-Healey
PatrologiaCDROM, showedthat the samepassagefromBede'sThirtyQuestions,wherethe termpontifexis used,
was copied verbatimby Claudiusof Turin (PL 104:688B and 742A), by RabanusMaurus (PL
109:72B),and by Angelomusof Luxeuil(PL115:333B),in theircommentarieson Kings.
185
186
188
189
Jerome, In Danielem 3 (CCSL 75A, p. 872, 11.281-84).

Biblia Sacra, ed. R. Weber, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1975), p. 1930: 3 Ezra 9.39-40, 50: "Et
dixeruntEzraepontificiet lectori,ut adferretlegemMoysi quaetraditaest a DominoDeo Israhel.Et

adtulitEzraspontifexlegemomnimultitudini..... Et dixitAttaratesEzraepontificiet lectori..." (the
siglumA in Weber'sappendixindicatesthatthetext of 3 and4 Ezrais takenfromAmiens,Bibliotheque
of the Septuagint.
municipale10 [ninthcentury]).PontifexhererendersapXticpcug
190SeeDonatienDe Bruyne,"Cassiodoreet l'Amiatinus,"Revuebenedictine39 (1927), 263.
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Amiatinus, and it is also the one Bede used as the basis for his later commentary
on Ezra. Jerome in his preface to Ezra had spoken scathingly of 3 and 4 Ezra:
"Nec quemquam moveat, quod unus a nobis editus liber est, nec apocriforum
tertii et quarti libri somniis delectetur.... "191 But it-may not have been immediately evident to the young Bede that Ezra A' of the Codex Grandior was one of
the books Jerome was attacking as 3 Ezra. Bede may have become wiser with
time, for it is interesting to note that in his later commentary on Ezra, composed
long after the departure of the Codex Amiatinus for Rome, he never again explicitly alluded to Ezra as pontifex, despite the fact that this theme would have
greatly enhanced the picture he draws of Ezra as a type of Christ.192He may by
then have come to realize that some features of the image of Ezra in Ceolfrith's
pandects, dating from a much earlier period of his life, did not correspond with
what he now perceived to be historical reality.
Although it has sometimes been claimed that the Ezra figure in the Codex Amiatinus is clothed like a Jewish priest, it is now recognized that two of the insignia
he bears identify him unmistakably as a high priest or pontifex.193 It can be
doubted that the Wearmouth-Jarrow library possessed images of Hebrew high
priests for the local artists to consult. But such images were not really necessary.
To design the appropriate insignia for Ezra all they needed was chapter 27 of
Exodus, or the Antiquities of Josephus, for a description of the rationale or jeweled
breastplate with its twelve stones set in four rows.194And as regards the distinctive
headgear of the high priest, the source was probably the elaborate description in
the Antiquities of Josephus, a work we know was at Wearmouth-Jarrow.Josephus
explains that the high priest shared the pilleum, or bonnet, with all other priests
but in addition had a gold crown, above which rose in the middle of his forehead,
as it were, a small gold chalice of the dimensions of the small finger:
pilleumautempriorisimiliteroperatumhabetpontifex,sicutreliquisacerdotes.... Circumdaturautem ei et aurea corona tribus versibusfacta, supra quae surgit in media
fronte quasi caliculusquidamaureus.... calicemergo quem diximus supracoronam
aureampositum, habet magnitudinemdigiti minoris,cuius cavatio rotundaest quasi
crateris....195
These verbal descriptions of breastplate and headgear help to explain what we see
in the image of Amiatinus. We can discern a stem about the size of a small finger
191BibliaSacra,ed.
Weber,pp. 638-39.
Althoughin his commentaryon EzraBedeneveragainqualifiesEzraas pontifex,the following
passagefrom the commentarymay representa slip or an echo of his earlierstand:"Cuiusetiam in
actibussuisfiguramEzrastenuitcumet ipsepartempopulinon minimamde captiuitateHierosolimam
reduxitsimulet pecuniamac uasaDeo sacratain gloriamtemplieius aduexitcum eundempopulum
ab uxoribusalienigenispontificalianctoritatepurgauit"(In Ezramet Neemiam2 [CCSL119A, p.
310, 11.886-901).
193 See
Merten,"DieEsra-Miniatur,"
p. 306.
194
Exod.27.15-20 describesthe four rows of preciousstones,with threestonesto a row.Josephus
thus describesthe essin or rationaleworn by the high priest(princepssacerdotum):"suntautemin
essin id est in rationaliduodecimlapidesmagnitudineet decorepraecipui.... isti siquidemlapides
per quattuorordines,terniper singulosordinesconstitutisunt"(Antiquitates3.166-67, ed. Blatt,p.
239).
192
195 Antiquitates
3.172, 174 (ed. Blatt, p. 240).
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rising above the head of the seated figure and terminating with a slightly wider
circumference at the top.196A round halo was also added to the Amiatinus image
to underline the sanctity of the personage whom Bede calls beatus Ezra.
Two verses were inserted over the refurbished image to clarify its meaning and
explain that Ezra is being shown restoring the Hebrew books that had been destroyed:
Codicibus sacris hostili clade perustis
EsdraDeo feruenshoc reparauitopus.197

Since these same verses occur at the end of one of Alcuin's poems on the Bible, it
has been suggested that they represent a later addition to the Amiatinus painting,
borrowed from the poem.198It was not Alcuin, however, but Bede who originally
composed the couplet and who possibly added it himself to the image to clarify
its meaning. We know that Bede composed in verse, and there are sufficient verbal
parallels between these two lines and his own works to establish his authorship.
In addition to his fondness for hostili and feruens we find him using:
hostili clade perustae199
enormi est clade damnata200
hostili sit clade peritura201
quia et naturale est inminente captiuitate hostilique per agros urbesque clade feruente
cunctos qui euadere queant.202
The presence of the couplet, however, at the end of Alcuin's Poem 69 (Dum primus
pulchro) has a bearing on the present investigation.203The last four lines (201-4)
of this poem read:
Codicibus sacris hostili clade perustis
Ezra Deo feruens hoc reparauit opus
considerablyfrom the bulkierornamentswe find on the
196 The Amiatinushead ornamentdiffers
heads of Aaron and Moses in the Byzantine Octateuchs (see Hesseling, Miniatures de l'Octateuque,
illus. 191) and in the manuscripts of Cosmas Indicopleustes (Stornajolo, Le miniature della Topografia,
plate 16, and SC 141, p. 192, fig. 7).
197 The verses,
though not always included in reproductions, are nevertheless an integral part of this
image since they explain how the Cassiodorus portrait came to be interpreted as Ezra. Note the use
of the pre-Vulgate form Esdra. Esdra was the form used in the Codex Grandior. In the headings of
Amiatinus Ezrae and Esdra are both found (see Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament, p. 120, n.
59). There was probably a period of fluctuation until Jerome's spelling became the accepted norm at
Wearmouth-Jarrow.
198 For
example, E. H. Zimmermann, Vorkarolingische Miniaturen (Berlin, 1916), Text, p. 112, n.
2: "Die Verse fiber dem Bilde sind aus einem alkuinischen Gedicht spater daribergesetzt." Likewise,
Merten, "Die Esra-Miniatur,"p. 306: "Die Verse sind entnommen aus dem Gedicht 'In sacrum bibliorum codicem' des frankischen Theologen und Bildungsreformers Alkuin."
199In Ezram 2 (CCSL 119A, p. 307, 11.774-75).
200 In Canticum Abacuc
(CCSL 119B, p. 399, 1. 507).
201 In Lucam 5
(CCSL 120, p. 341, 11.1837-38).
202 In Lucam 6
(CCSL 120, p. 400, 11.1493-95). Note the conjunction here of feruen* with hostil*:
according to CLCLT Bede uses some form of feruen* sixty-three times and of hostil* twenty-four
times. By way of contrast, for Ambrose, the ratio is twenty-six (feruen*) and seven (hostil*).
203 MGH Poet
1, ed. E. Dummler, pp. 288-92.
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Hoc opus, hoc etenimflammiste subtrahitatris,
O lector,si tu pacis amorelegis.
The poem is lengthy, giving a description of the contents of the Bible. It was
probably first transmitted through a collection of Alcuin's verses. Although not
found in any of the surviving Alcuinian Bibles, Bonifatius Fischer thought thatexcept for the final four lines-it might originally have belonged to one of the
lost Bibles.204He therefore reprinted the poem in his study of these Bibles, without
its final four lines (although there is no manuscript evidence to justify this omission).205Fischer remained puzzled about the origin of these lines, posing the question: "Hat jemand die Verse im Rom im Amiatinus gesehen und sie wie andere
Inschriften notiert?"206
For anyone who ascribes the poem to the period of the Alcuinian Bibles, which
originate around 800, the concluding lines are bound to create a special difficulty.
This problem disappears completely if we take a totally different view of the poem,
as Karen Corsano has imaginatively suggested.207An analysis of the poem shows
that Alcuin must have composed it after he had encountered a pandect that closely
resembled the Codex Amiatinus-almost certainly one of Ceolfrith's other pandects. Unlike the true Alcuinian Bibles, the text of this Bible was laid out per cola
et commata (1.185). It would seem that it included an image of the Tabernacle
(11.74-75), but not of the Temple, and also the image of Ezra whose couplet (11.
201-2) he borrowed to end his poem. Alcuin's use of corpus in lines 27 ("Continet
iste uno sancto sub corpore codex") and 183 ("Quisque legat huius sacrato in
corpore libri") suggests the presence of this word in Cassiodorus's prologue ("in
hoc autem corpore utrumque testamentum ... probatur impletum"). Other lines
of the poem, (11.33-34) "Qui cupit inueniet scripturas discere sacras / Sanctorum
dicta hic ueneranda patrum," appear to echo a phrase from the same prologue
("doctrina tamen patrum ad instructionem caelestis ecclesia concorditer uniuersa
perducunt"). Whether the uestes Aaron of line 80 can be connected with the text
on Leviticus of the Pentateuch circles page is less clear, since Alcuin was obviously
very familiar with Letter 53 of Jerome; he made much use of it in composing this
poem. The letter accounts for the rather odd order of the biblical books in the
poem, an order that corresponds neither to Amiatinus nor to the Alcuinian Bibles.
If Poem 69 was in part inspired by Alcuin's encountering a Bible closely resembling
the Codex Amiatinus, can we envisage historical circumstances in which such an
encounter could occur?
Alcuin left Charlemagne's court in 790 to spend three years in England. Although we lack a detailed account of his movements during this period, we know
that he had close relations with King Offa of Mercia (757-96), while also re-
in LateinischeBibelhandschriften
Fischer,"DieAlkuin-Bibeln,"
(above,n. 23), pp. 229-30.
Ibid.,pp. 231-37. Marsden,TheTextof the Old Testament,pp. 121-22, disagreeswith Fischer
on this point and acceptsthe finalfourversesas an integralpartof Alcuin'spoem.
206 "Die
Alkuin-Bibeln,"
p. 230, n. 82.
207
Corsano,"TheFirstQuire,"pp. 20-22.
204
205
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879
maining in touch with Charlemagne.208He was still in England when the Normans
devastated Lindisfarne on 8 June 793, and a letter he sent that same year to the
monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow shows that he knew their monastery.209Had this
visit to the monasteries in the north provided an occasion for the composition of
the poem? Another even more interesting possibility remains. One of Ceolfrith's
Bibles eventually came into the possession of the Benedictine cathedral priory of
Worcester, and a local medieval tradition held that it had been presented to the
monastery by King Offa of Mercia. A charter-probably forged or interpolatedrecords Offa's gift of the Bible, together with that of some land, on 22 September
780.210 A more reliable witness to the Offa tradition, however, is the letter of
We know from
Senatus Bravonius (1189-96), prior and librarian of Worcester.211
a document in the Heming chartulary that St. Wulfstan (c. 1009-95), bishop and
prior of Worcester, ordered some important charters to be copied into the great
Bible of his church. At the time of Worcester's dissolution in 1540 the Willoughby
208 For
Alcuin's absences in England from Charlemagne'scourt in 786 and 790-93 see J. M. WallaceHadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), p. 205; for an instance of his involvement with Offa
in 793, during his stay in England, see Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth
Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 244-48; for his relations both with Offa and Charlemagne during this
period, see Donald Bullough's Alcuin, Reputation and Achievement (forthcoming).
209 Alcuin, Epistolae 19 (MGH Epp 4, pp. 53-56): Alcuin has loved their way of life from the time
he first came to know it; he is aware of their vast library,the beauty of their church and other buildings;
he regrets that their youths do not attend all the liturgical functions and spend much time hunting
foxes and coursing hares; he rejoices in the "familiaritas quam perdonastis mihi." These are all sentiments of someone familiar with Bede's monastic home. In his letter (Epistolae 282, ibid., pp. 440-41)
to the newly appointed abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Friduinus, Alcuin seems aware of the abbot's
fondness for wearing gold rings ("confusio est uitae tuae digitos auro radiare").
210 P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), p.
101, no. 118. Sawyer fails to include the gift of the Bible in his heading. The sentence in the charter
reads: "Insuper dedi ad predictam ecclesiam bibliothecam optimam, cum duabus armillis ex auro
purissimo fabricatis, conditione facta inter me et episcopum, ut memoria anime mee in predicta sit in
eternum" (Hemingi chartularium [Oxford, 1723], p. 95). Senatus, the twelfth-century prior of Worcester, uses bibliotheca for "Bible" (see next note). But given what we know about the English usage of
this word in the eighth century (see n. 81 above), its presence in a charter purporting to come from
Offa is enough to arouse suspicions about the document's authenticity.
211 I thank Giles Constable for
kindly providing me with a photocopy of the letter from Edmond
Martene and Ursin Durand's Thesaurus novus anecdotorum, 1 (Paris, 1717), cols. 484-86 (who got
their text from a manuscript of Conches in Normandy). The letter is also found in Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College, MS 48, fols. 199r-200r (M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Cambridge, Eng., 1912], p. 95), and in Dublin, Trinity College,
MS 51, fols. 105v-106v (M. L. Colker, Trinity College Library Dublin: Descriptive Catalogue of the
Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts, 1 [Dublin, 1991], p. 91). The addressee, Aeluredus
(whose name is missing in Martene), had queried Senatus about the concordance of Gospel canon
tables. Senatus, at one point, admits the complexity of this question and then continues with a glancing
reference to the Offa Bible: "Noueris autem non modicam difficultatem mihi ex dissonantia librorum
emersisse, et aliquando impedimento fuisse exequendi quod misisti, quia uix est ut aliqui codices sese
aequis passibus respiciant circa assignationem canonum, adeo omnes denigrauit imperitia scripturae.
Tandem reuoluens bibliothecam quam Romae conscriptam beatae memoriae rex Offa ecclesiae nostrae
contulisse dicitur, per singula capitula discurens probaui uetustatem, et inueni ad nutum mihi omnia
ministrantem." He then contrasts the reading for Mark 8.38 in this Bible with the faulty reading for
this same verse found in many other manuscripts. It was probably natural for Senatus to consider that
a manuscript like the Ceolfrith pandect, written in uncial and capitalis, would have come from Rome.
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family acquired its possessions. While in their hands the famous Bible was dismembered to reinforce various family chartularies, and thus a few leaves of Ceolfrith's pandect (together with some from Wulfstan's chartulary added to the Bible)
survived and ultimately reached the British Library.
Alcuin's Poem 69 gives rise to interesting conjectures and may add substance to
the Offa-Worcester tradition. Before concluding the-poem cited above, Alcuin
inserted a prayer (11.195-200) on behalf of Charlemagne, calling down God's
blessing on the king:
Qui solita Karolumregempietategubernet,
semperin eternumprotegatatqueregat.
Dicat et omnis amenpopulorumturbaper orbem:
Hoc tribuatcaeli Christusab arcepius,
Ut multisuiuatfelix feliciterannis,
Post haec et teneatregnabeatadei.
Nowhere in Alcuin's long poem is there a clear suggestion that it was intended to
accompany the gift of a Bible to the Frankish king. The main thrust of the verses
seems simply to encourage all readers to meditate on the words of Scripture: (vv.
29-30) "Omnia namque nouae ac ueteris pia famina legis / Hic te non dubites,
lector, habere pius"; (vv. 203-4) "Hoc opus, hoc etenim flammis te subtrahis atris,
/ O lector, si tu pacis amore legis." On a visit north did Alcuin perchance succeed
in acquiring one of Ceolfrith's Bibles in the hope of carrying it one day to Charlemagne, only to discover on his return to Mercia that Offa coveted the book?212
The contents of the poem, Alcuin's links with Wearmouth-Jarrow,his known connections with Charlemagne and with Offa, and the tradition of Offa's gift to
Worcester seem somehow or other to be connected, although it may be impossible
at this point to unravel the tangle. We may never know the answer. From my point
of view, however, the main importance of the poem is to confirm that, on some
points at least, Ceolfrith's other pandects resembled the Codex Amiatinus. In addition to what can be determined from the few leaves of the sister pandect that
survive, we can also conclude that this Bible had an image of Ezra, an image of
the Tabernacle (but not of the Temple), and the Cassiodoran prologus.
The relationship between the Ezra image of Amiatinus and the Matthew portrait
in the Lindisfarne Gospels has often been noted but never satisfactorily explained.
Some connection between these two seated figures is obvious to anyone who looks
at the two images placed side by side. Bruce-Mitford argued that "the Lindisfarne
Matthew did not copy the Amiatinus Ezra. They are independent copies of the
same model."213The situation, however, is slightly more complex than BruceMitford supposed.
212
to his
Shouldthis have beenthe case, Alcuinmightwell haveaddedthe prayerfor Charlemagne
versesin orderto transformthe poem into a gift suitablefor presentationin place of the Bible.
213
2 (Oltenand Lausanne,1960), pp. 146-48. Bruce-Mitford's
CodexLindisfarnensis,
analysisof
the Ezraimagehere makesinterestingreading.He remaineda little skepticalabout the explanation
Courcellehadgivenhim of Cassiodorus'sseekingto presenthimselfunderthe guiseof Ezra:"Iconfess
to some uneasiness:for it remainspossiblethat a Cassiodorusportraitwas changedat Wearmouth/
Jarrowinto one of Ezra.Thereareclearsignsof alterationor overpainting-for example,in the book
below the poised hand;in Ezra'swrist, to which gold leaf is applied,and which does not matchthe
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Pandects were not the only manuscripts being written at Wearmouth-Jarrow.

Bede's monastery was also busy producing "Teilhandschriften"-to use the terminology of Bonifatius Fischer-manuscripts containing smaller groups of biblical texts. This emerges from new evidence recently uncovered, showing that Bede
composed numerous capitula lectionum or short summaries intended to accompany such groups of biblical books.214If, on his own admission, he composed
capitula for the whole New Testament with the exception of the Gospels,21sthis
was not because Wearmouth-Jarrowwas not producing Gospel books, but simply
because Bede was satisfied with a particular series of Gospel capitula that already
existed, a series he adopted as the literary model for his own capitula. Bede copied
this Gospel series into his commentaries on Mark and Luke. It was the one included in the Codex Amiatinus, and it is likewise found in the Lindisfarne Gospels
and a few other Northumbrian manuscripts. The inference to be drawn is clear:
one of the "Teilhandschriften"produced at Wearmouth-Jarrowwas a Gospel book
that used this series of Gospel capitula, and it included Evangelist portraits, its
Matthew being modeled on the Cassiodorus portrait of the Codex Grandior. We
need only suppose that such a Gospel book was sent to Lindisfarne as a gift to
have a satisfactory explanation of the relationship between the Ezra of Amiatinus
and the Lindisfarne Matthew. This Gospel book, now lost, with its capitula and
Evangelist portraits-the creation, no doubt, of the Wearmouth-Jarrow artistsis the link connecting the two manuscripts that still survive.
As for the spiritual meaning the Wearmouth-Jarrow communities attributed to
their refurbished image of "Ezra"-viewed seated "renewing Scripture" before a
cupboard holding the books of both Testaments-it is again to Bede that we must
turn.216Ezra was viewed as a typus or figure of Christ, securely linked to both
Covenants. Although Bede's commentary on Ezra was written several years after
the image was painted, the lucidity of his eulogy of Ezra, as a figure of Christ,
leads one to suspect that he had had a hand in helping to shape the Ezra image:
Ezrasurelyis the type of the LordSaviorsincehe renewedScripture,recalledthe people
out of captivityto Jerusalem,enrichedthe house of the Lordwith greatergifts, establishedleadersand rulersbeyondthe Euphrateswho werefamiliarwith the laws of God,
sleeve;and in the gold beltwhichseemsto pass overa surfacealreadyfullypainted.Thesearematters

thatmustbe decidedin a futurere-scrutinyof the original.... It seemsreasonableto suppose,however,
thatunderthe Ezrainsignia,whethertheseareoriginalor whethertheywereadded,we haveessentially
a portraitof the agedCassiodorus."
214 SeeP.
Revuebenedictine
Meyvaert,"Bede'sCapitulalectionumforthe OldandNew Testaments,"
105 (1995), 348-80.
215 In his
autobiography(Historiaecclesiastica5.24) Bede states that he composed"capitulalectionumin totumNouumTestamentum,exceptoeuangelio."
216 In his articleon Ezrafor vol. 6 of the Reallexikonfir Antikeund Christentum
Schneemelcher
noted, col. 611, how seldomEzrais picturedin Christianart, addingthe followingcomment:"Die
Griindefur diesesselteneVorkommenE. in derKunstlassensichnurvermuten.Wichtigist vor allem,
dafi E. im christl.Bereichkeine theologischeRelevanzgehabt hat u. auch fur die Heilsgeschichte
jeglicherBedeutungentbehrte.Daherspielter auchin derKunstkeineRolle."He makesno reference
to Bede, and since over thirtymedievalmanuscriptswith Bede'scommentaryon Ezrasurvive,one
would need solid proof that this commentaryexercisedno influenceon medievaltheologicalthought
in orderto subscribeto sucha conclusion.
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and reproachedthe sons of the captivityfor takingforeignwives. In similarmannerthe

LordrestoredHoly Scripture,which scribesand Phariseeshad soiled by theircustoms
or interpretedonly accordingto the letter,since he showed the writingsof Moses and
the Prophetsto be full of deep spiritualmeaning,and by sendingthe Holy Spiritupon
them he causedApostlesand apostolicmen to write the New Testament.(Restaurauit
enimdominusscripturamsacramquiaquamscribaeet Pharisaeiuel per traditionessuas
foedauerantuel iuxta litteramtantumintellegendamesse docebantipse spiritalisensu
plenamprout a Moyse uel prophetisscriptaerat ostenditsed et nouum testamentum
misso desuperspiritusancto per apostolossiue apostolicosuiros fecit describi.)He led
the people out of the Babyloniancaptivity,and after freeingthem broughtthem to
Jerusalemandinto the promisedland;dyingonce uponthe cross,he redeemedthewhole
world through his blood, and descendinginto Hell, he snatchedall true Israelites,
namely,the chosen ones he found there, and leading them into the precinctsof the
heavenlycity, grantedthem the joys of their promisedheritage;daily he gathersthe
faithful from the tribulationsof this earth into the fold of Holy Church and into
the eternalkingdom.He increasedthe adornmentof the templewith gold and silverand
preciousvases, which Jewishpeople or Persianrulerssent to the Templethroughhim.
He broughtpeoplefrom both sideswho believedin him (namely,fromthe Jewsand the
Gentiles)into the church,and he neverceases to adornhis churchwith the brightness
of theirfaithand works.He establishedleadersandrulersoverthe whole peoplebeyond
the Euphrates,leaderswho knew and taught God's law, for he placed Apostles and
Evangelistsas shepherdsover Holy Churchwhich, washedin the riverof baptism,by
the sincerityof its faith transcendsthe riverof the Babylonians(namely,the upheavals
of this changingworld).He reproachedthe sons of captivityfor takingforeignwives by
forbiddingthose who in theirprofessionof faith haverenouncedthe enticementsof the
world to pay it any furtherhomage.217
Endowed with such a powerful symbolic message, the image of Ezra must have
seemed a fitting frontispiece to Bede and his community for the books of the Old
and New Testament that followed. One may ask, however, whether the reinterpreted image of Cassiodorus as Ezra, type of Christ, placed at the beginning of
the Old Testament, did not demand for the sake of completion and symmetry
an image of Christ himself to introduce the New Testament. This may explain
the Christ in Majesty painted on folio 796v of the Codex Amiatinus, immediately preceding the New Testament.218If this reasoning did indeed cause its placement there, we would have good grounds for considering it a creation of the
Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium, a composition with no direct link to the Codex
Grandior, although possibly based on some other ancient image brought back to
Northumbria from the Continent.
Given all that has been said above, it seems fitting that the names of Cassiodorus
and Bede should be closely linked together. When, in the course of the sixth century, the Roman senator inserted into his Codex Grandior three images-of himself, of the Tabernacle, and of the Temple-he surely had no inkling of the profound influence these same images would one day exert on a young Anglo-Saxon
217
218
In Ezram et Neemiam 2 (CCSL119A, pp. 336-37, 11.1957-88).

"TheArtof the CodexAmiatinusa,"
Forreproductionsof thisfolio see Bruce-Mitford,
plateXIII;
Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, illus. 26.
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883
monk in a corner of faraway Northumbria. Without the spell cast by these images
in Ceolfrith's Old Latin pandect on the young monk of Jarrow, it is unlikely that
we would possess today Bede's treatises on the Tabernacle, the Temple, or the
Book of Ezra.
POSTSCRIPT
Keepingabreastof the bibliographyrelevantto a particulartopic is not an easy matter

in today'sworld, overloadedwith publications.The following items deservenotice since
they are directlyrelated,in one way or another,to mattersdiscussedin this article.
IanWood'srecentJarrowLecture,entitledTheMost Holy Abbot Ceolfrid(Jarrow,Eng.,
1995), deservesto be includedin any essay concernedwith the activityof Bede'sabbot.
Amongthe pointsit raises(not discussedabove)is whetherBederesidedmoreconsistently
at Jarrowthan at Wearmouth:see page 16 and especiallyhis commentsin note 207. I, like
manyothers,had takenit for grantedthat Bede-after movingas a boy to Jarrow-spent
the rest of his life there.
As regardsthe artisticbackgroundfor the illustrationsproducedin Cassiodorus'sscriptorium at Vivarium,the ongoing investigationsof Fabio Troncarelliare likely to prove
important.I thankhim cordiallyfor providingme with some offprintsof his work on the
manuscriptsof Cassiodorus.Here one observationneeds to be made. Note 95 above left
open the questionconcerninguse by Cassiodorusof a GreekillustratedOctateuchor a
manuscriptof CosmasIndicopleustes.Troncarelliin his article"Unapieta piu profonda:
Scienzae medicinanella culturamonasticamedievaleitaliana,"in Gian CarloAlessio et
al., Dall'eremo al cenobio: La civilta monastica in Italia dalle origini all'eta di Dante
(Milan, 1987), p. 712 (illustrations 535 and 536), juxtaposes fol. 93r from Vat. gr. 699
(Cosmas) with fol. llv from Wiirzburg, Universitatsbibliothek, MS M. p. Misc. F 5a (an
eighth-century manuscript of the Institutiones); this makes it difficult to believe that Cassiodorus did not have in hand a manuscript of Cosmas-a source sufficient to explain the
Tabernacle image of the Codex Grandior. Troncarelli's researches into the decoration of
Cassiodoran manuscripts (see, for example, "Alpha e acciuga: Immagini simboliche nei
codici di Cassiodoro," Quaderni medievali 41 [1996], 6-26) are sure to throw new light
on the decoration of the pages of Amiatinus containing the three divisions of Scripture,
and to help determine whether the decorative motifs found on those pages do not also
come from the Codex Grandior.
Paul Meyvaert, who retired as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy and Editor of
Speculum in 1981, lives at 8 Hawthorne Pk., Cambridge, MA 02138.
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Paul Meyvaert - Bede, Cassiodorus, and The Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus,

and the Codex Amiatinus

A passage in Bede's commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah expresses his great

Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

Bede, In Ezram et Neemiam 2 (CCSL 119A, p. 295, 11.280-89).

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

(Chrysostom) to be translated into Latin,15but the only work on Acts to which

Institutiones 1.9.1 (ed. Mynors, p. 33).

See below at n. 44.

Bonifatius Fischer, "Codex Amiatinus und Cassiodor," in Lateinische Bibelhandschriften im friihen

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

24 Otto-Karl Werckmeister made much use of the

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

W. Levison, "Bede as Historian," in Bede, ed. Thompson, p. 133.

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

Nos enim et tabernaculum,quod eius imago primitusfuit, et templumipsumfecimus

41 Cassiodorus,ExpositioPsalmorum86 (CCSL98, pp. 789-90, 11.40-44); I incorporate

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus

... bibliothecam,quamde Romauel ipse [Ceolfridus],uel Benedictusadtulerat,nobiliter

47Historiaabbatumauctoreanonymo20 (ed. C. Plummer[Oxford,1896], p. 395). Forcommunity

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Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus

On the problemof datingAmiatinusand its sisterpandectssee now the commentsof Richard

106. Any calculationinvolvingtime shouldtake into accountthe difficultyof writingduringthe cold

ed. D. Whitelock(London,1968), p. 766.

p. 269). Cassiodoruswas ready,butperhapsgrudgingly,to followJeromein thosecaseswhereJerome

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Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

60 All three divisions are

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Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus

Divisio Scripturae divinae secundum sanctum Hieronymum

1.13.2 (ed. Mynors, p. 39).

CCSL 98, p. 1241, 11.8-11.

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

below, pp. 881-82.

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

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Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

episcopiLeoniset damnavitEutychemet Nestoriumvel omnes sequaceseorumet vel

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Bede, Cassiodorus,and the Codex Amiatinus

Fig. 1. Codex Amiatinus: The court with Tabernacle (see n. 85).