Book of Kells Part 1 Documentary

Around the year 750, Irish monks laboring in isolation on a tiny island of Iona off Scotland s west coast began work on a book that would outlast empires, a book that many say may be the greatest illustrated version of the Gospels ever made. Well, it wasn t quite a book really. It was a codexthe first step up from a scroll and toward a modern bound and printed book. Codex salesmen were quick to tout the advantages: you can open a codex to any page (try that with a scroll), you can write on both sides of the parchment or (in the deluxe model) vellum, and you can bind together long works. For more than a century, the small monastic community on the tiny island had been laboring faithfully to copy and preserve classical and biblical texts that few in Europe even knew existed. It wasn t an easy life. The monks lived and worked in beehivelike stone structures with few creature comforts. But their art has been called the work of angels. The Book of Kells was to be their masterwork: the four Gospels of t