Saint Cuthbert’s Gospel, now in the British Library, is the oldest European codex to survive intact in its original binding. It is a small book, 137mm x 97mm, made in the early eighth century as a relic for the coffin of Saint Cuthbert, the bishop of the Christian foundation at Lindisfarne in Northumbria.

The book is bound between to two wooden boards, covered in fine-grained, red-stained goat skin leather, and decorated with a raised-relief pattern. The binding or sewing is an unsupported link or loop stitch, a style common throughout the eastern Mediterranean, used on Christian books of the late Roman and early medieval period and also seen on Islamic book bindings (this ubiquitous sewing style is animated in the Hidden Stories' 3D Book Binding Visualization Prototype, part of the project's development of digital Tools).

As book historians have long recognized, Saint Cuthbert's enigmatic manuscript alludes to a larger local and global story: its materials and its structure resemble the bindings of pocket gospels from Ireland and Britain, but its closest analogues are among the covers of early Qur’anic manuscripts, such as those in Kairouan, Tunisia. In collaboration with an international team of experts, the Hidden Stories project seeks to understand the global craft techniques and trade networks that lie behind this book as well as other Northumbrian manuscripts of the early mediaeval period.

We will post updates as this research area gets underway.

The British Library's YouTube visualization of the St Cuthbert Gospel created using CT scanning