6 - The importation of Mediterranean manuscripts into Theodore's England

Summary

The despatch of Christian missionaries necessarily meant also the despatch of books, for in as much as Christianity was a religion which referred constantly to its Holy Scriptures, employed also a range of books detailing its church services, and had developed a body of law-texts governing its own actions, there was an irreducible minimum of written materials without which even the most practically minded group of missionaries would wish to function. Even if we had no other information on the point, therefore, we should assume that the first Roman missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I to England would have been equipped with a quantity of fundamental Christian texts, probably including high-status books designed to impress by their quality, size and decoration. Bede, who is necessarily our informant, offered no remarks on this matter when speaking of the arrival of Abbot Augustine and his party in 597; but in his account of the reinforcements sent by Gregory in 601 and led by Abbot Mellitus he specified that among ‘uniuersa quae ad cultum erant ac ministerium ecclesiae necessaria’ brought by them were codices plurtmos. It has long been thought that among the books brought to Kent in the opening years of the mission was the sixth-century manuscript of the gospels, now known as ‘St Augustine's Gospels’ – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 286. From time to time other candidates for comparably early importation have been suggested, but none of these attributions can be demonstrated beyond doubt.