page_title: St Cuthbert Gospel
section_title: Durham Cathedral
hierarchical_section_title: St Cuthbert Gospel / History / Durham Cathedral
caption_attribution_description: English: A miniature in the British Library Yates Thomson MS 26, with Saint Cuthbert's shoes healing a sick man
context_page_description: The St Cuthbert Gospel, also known as the Stonyhurst Gospel or the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, is an early 8th-century pocket gospel book, written in Latin. Its finely decorated leather binding is the earliest known Western bookbinding to survive, and both the 94 vellum folios and the binding are in outstanding condition for a book of this age. With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres, the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity.
  The book takes its name from Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, North East England, in whose tomb it was placed, probably a few years after his death in 687. Although it was long regarded as Cuthbert's personal copy of the Gospel, to which there are early references, and so a relic of the saint, the book is now thought to date from shortly after Cuthbert's death. It was probably a gift from Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey, where it was written, intended to be placed in St Cuthbert's coffin in the few decades after this was placed behind the altar at Lindisfarne in 698.
context_section_description: In 1104, early in the bishopric of Ranulf Flambard, Cuthbert's tomb was opened again and his relics translated to a new shrine behind the main altar of the half-built Norman cathedral.  According to the earlier of the two accounts of the event that survive, known as "Miracles 18–20" or the "anonymous account", written by a monk of the cathedral, when the monks opened the decorated inner coffin, which was for the first time in living memory, they saw "a book of the Gospels lying at the head of the board", that is on the shelf or inner lid.  The account in "Miracle 20" adds that Bishop Flambard, during his sermon on the day the new shrine received Cuthbert's body, showed the congregation "a Gospel of Saint John in miraculously perfect condition, which had a satchel-like container of red leather with a badly frayed sling made of silken threads".  In addition the book itself has an inscription on folio 1r "written in a modest book-hand apparently of the later twelfth century" recording that it was found in the translation.
  As far as is known the book remained at Durham for the remainder of the Middle Ages, until the Dissolution, kept as a relic in three bags of red leather, normally resting in a reliquary, and there are various records of it being shown to visitors, the more distinguished of which were allowed to hang it round their neck for a while.  According to Reginald of Durham (d. c 1190) "anyone approaching it should wash, fast and dress in an alb before touching it", and he recorded that a scribe called John who failed to do this during a visit by the Archbishop of York in 1153–54, and "held it with unwashed hands after eating was struck down with a chill".  Books treated as relics are especially characteristic of Celtic Christianity; several of the surviving Irish book-shrines were worn in this way.
  Another recorded copy of the Gospel of John has also been associated with Cuthbert, and sometimes thought to be the St Cuthbert Gospel.  Saint Boisil (d. 664) of Melrose Abbey was Cuthbert's teacher.  Bede's prose life of Cuthbert records that during Boisil's last illness, he and Cuthbert read daily one of the seven gatherings or quaternions of Boisil's manuscript of the Gospel of John.  The sermon in Miracle 20 identifies this manuscript with the one at Durham, and says that both saints had worn it round their necks, ignoring that it has twelve gatherings rather than seven.  There are further references from Durham to Boisil's book, such as a list of relics in the cathedral in 1389, and some modern scholars were attracted to the idea that they were the same, but Brown's palaeographical evidence seems to remove the possibility of Boisil's book being the St Cuthbert Gospel.  In the 11th century Boisil's remains had also been brought to Durham, and enshrined next to those of Cuthbert.  Around the same time Bede's own remains were stolen from Monkwearmouth–Jarrow for Durham, by a "notably underhand trick", and placed in Cuthbert's coffin, where they remained until 1104.
caption: A paralytic is healed by putting on Cuthbert's shoes from his tomb at Lindisfarne (Ch 45, Life of Cuthbert).
exif: {"Image Rating": "0", "Image Tag 0x4749": "0", "Image Tag 0x5012": "1", "Image ExifOffset": "2134", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "11", "Thumbnail YResolution": "11", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4308", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3000", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}