Codex Amiatinus (c. 700): Oldest Complete Latin Vulgate Bible

The Codex Amiatinus is the oldest surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible, written at the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow shortly before 716. Abbot Ceolfrith had it made as a gift for the pope, and it still survives in Florence. Its sheer size, its fine Italian-style script and its English origin make it one of the most remarkable books of the early Middle Ages.

Background: Wearmouth-Jarrow

The book came from one of the richest centres of learning in early medieval Europe. The nobleman-turned-monk Benedict Biscop founded St Peter’s at Wearmouth in 674, and St Paul’s at Jarrow followed in about 681-682 under Ceolfrith. The two houses were run as a single community.

Biscop and Ceolfrith travelled to Rome several times and brought back books, relics, paintings and craftsmen. Among the books acquired in 678 was probably the Codex Grandior, a large Bible associated with the 6th-century scholar Cassiodorus and his monastery of Vivarium in southern Italy. This library made Wearmouth-Jarrow the home of the scholar Bede, who described the community’s history in his Lives of the Abbots. His later Ecclesiastical History of the English People drew on the same collection.

Three great Bibles

According to Bede, Ceolfrith ordered three pandects, meaning complete Bibles in one volume. One was placed in each church of the twin monastery, and the third was intended for the pope in Rome. The Codex Amiatinus is that third copy. Only a few leaves of the two sister Bibles survive, mostly in the British Library.

The text is Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, completed around 400. Wearmouth-Jarrow’s scribes worked from high-quality Italian exemplars and produced one of the best early witnesses to Jerome’s text. The Psalms follow Jerome’s translation made directly from the Hebrew.

The book itself

The figures are striking. The codex has more than 1,000 leaves of parchment, pages about 50 by 34 centimetres, and a weight of about 34 kilograms. Scholars estimate that the skins of roughly 500 calves were needed, a huge investment of the monastery’s herds and land.

The text is written in an elegant uncial script, a rounded book hand of late Roman origin. Several scribes worked on it, all trained to copy Italian models closely. The opening quires contain the best-known painting: the Old Testament scribe Ezra seated before a book cupboard, often compared with Cassiodorus’s lost Codex Grandior. A full-page Christ in Majesty with the four evangelists and diagrams of the Tabernacle also appear.

Journey to Rome and later history

In June 716 the elderly Ceolfrith resigned as abbot and set out for Rome with the Bible. He died on the journey at Langres in eastern France on 25 September 716. Some of his companions are thought to have continued to Rome and delivered the gift to Pope Gregory II.

The gift had a clear message. Northumbrian monks owed their Roman-style liturgy and learning to papal missions and to Biscop’s journeys, and at the Synod of Whitby in 664 the Northumbrian church had chosen Roman over Irish customs. Sending a flawless Bible back to the city of St Peter displayed both loyalty to Rome and the skill of an English monastery that had once been a missionary frontier.

By the 9th century the book was at the abbey of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata in Tuscany, which gave it its name. There the dedication page was altered to name a Lombard abbot called Peter. After the abbey was suppressed, the manuscript passed to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence in 1782, where it is catalogued as Amiatino 1.

Rediscovery of its origin

Because it looked so Italian, scholars long assumed the codex had been written in Italy. In the 1880s the Italian scholar Giovanni Battista de Rossi noticed that the altered dedication matched a verse recorded in an anonymous life of Ceolfrith. Further work by English scholars confirmed that the book had been made at Wearmouth-Jarrow.

This changed views of early English culture. A monastery at the edge of the known world had produced a Bible that could pass for a Roman one. In 2018-2019 the Codex was lent to the British Library for its Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, its first return to England since it left.

Timeline

• 674: Benedict Biscop founds the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth.
• 678: Biscop and Ceolfrith travel to Rome and acquire books, probably including the Codex Grandior.
• c. 681-682: Ceolfrith founds the sister house of St Paul at Jarrow.
• c. 692-716: The three great Bibles, including the Codex Amiatinus, are produced.
• 716, June: Ceolfrith leaves for Rome carrying the codex.
• 716, 25 September: Ceolfrith dies at Langres; his companions continue the journey.
• 1782: The manuscript enters the Laurentian Library in Florence.
• 1880s: Scholars identify its Northumbrian origin.

Why it matters

The Codex Amiatinus is a key witness to the text of the Latin Bible that shaped Western Christianity for over a thousand years. It also shows the reach of Anglo-Saxon learning around 700, the same culture that produced the Lindisfarne Gospels and, later, inspired the Carolingian Renaissance.