SOURCE: The "Book of Kells": An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 9-43, 89-92.

In the following excerpt, written in 1993, Meehan discusses the Book of Kells's historical background, decorative plan, influences, symbolism, themes, and purpose.

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It has always been difficult to write about the Book of Kells without resorting to hyperbole. Those who have tried to describe it betray almost a sense of disbelief, as though it had emerged from another world: 'the work, not of men, but of angels', as the thirteenth-century historian Giraldus Cambrensis put it; 'the product of a cold-blooded hallucination', in the words of Umberto Eco.¹

The Book of Kells, to express it more prosaically, is a large-format manuscript codex of the Latin text of the gospels. Preceding the gospels themselves are 'etymologies'...