page_title: St Cuthbert Gospel
section_title: After the Reformation
hierarchical_section_title: St Cuthbert Gospel / History / After the Reformation
caption_attribution_description: English: A miniature in the British Library Yates Thomson MS 26, Bede's Prose Life of St Cuthbert, depicting Cuthbert's meeting with Boisil at Melrose
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: It is thought likely that the book remained at Durham until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, although the various late medieval records of books and relics held there do not allow it to be identified with certainty.  Durham Cathedral Priory closed in 1540, and some decades later the book was recorded by Archbishop Ussher in the library of the Oxford scholar, antiquary and astrologer Thomas Allen (1542–1632) of Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College, Oxford).  However it is not in a catalogue of Allen's library of 1622, and was not in the collection of Allen's manuscripts that was presented to the Bodleian Library by Sir Kenelm Digby in 1634.  Nothing is then known of its whereabouts for a century or so.
  According to an 18th-century Latin inscription pasted to the inside cover of the manuscript, the St Cuthbert Gospel was given by the 3rd Earl of Lichfield (1718–1772) to the Jesuit priest Thomas Phillips S.J. (1708–1774) who donated it to the English Jesuit College at Liège on 20 June 1769.  Lichfield was an Anglican, but knew Phillips as the latter was chaplain to his neighbour in Oxfordshire, the recusant George Talbot, 14th Earl of Shrewsbury (1719–1787).  The manuscript was owned between 1769 and 2012 by the British Province of the Society of Jesus, and for most of this period was in the library of Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, successor to the Liège college.
  The manuscript was first published when in 1806 it was taken to London and displayed when a letter on it by the Rev. J. Milner, presumably Bishop John Milner, Catholic Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, was read to a meeting of the London Society of Antiquaries, which was subsequently printed in their journal Archaeologia.  Milner followed the medieval note in relating the book to Cuthbert, and compared its script to that of the Lindisfarne Gospels, by then in the British Museum, examining the two side by side.  However he thought that "the binding seems to be of the time of Queen Elizabeth"!  After the lecture it took some years to return to Stonyhurst as an intermediary forgot to forward it.  That the binding was original, and the earliest European example, was realised during the 19th century, and when exhibited in 1862 it was described in the catalogue as "In unique coeval (?) binding".  The whole appearance and feel of the book, and the accuracy of the text and beauty of the script was highly praised by scholars such as Bishop Christopher Wordsworth (1807–1885), nephew of the poet and an important New Testament textual scholar, who described the book as "surpassing in delicate simplicity of neatness every manuscript that I have seen".
caption: Boisil greets Cuthbert as he enters Melrose Abbey as a novice, having arrived with a horse and spear (Ch 6, Life of Cuthbert).
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