Lichfield Gospels

The Lichfield Gospels (also known as the St Chad Gospels, the Book of Chad, the Llandeilo Gospels, the St Teilo Gospels and variations of these) is an 8th-century Insular Gospel Book housed in Lichfield Cathedral. There are 236 surviving pages, eight of which are illuminated. Another four contain framed text. The pages measure 30.8 cm by 23.5 cm. The manuscript is also important because it includes, as marginalia, some of the earliest known examples of written Old Welsh, dating to the early part of the 8th century.^[1] The art historian Peter Lord dates the book at 730, placing it chronologically before the Book of Kells but after the Lindisfarne Gospels.^[2]

Marginal entries indicate that the manuscript was in the possession of the church of St Teilo in Wales at some point in the 9th century and eventually came into the possession of Lichfield Cathedral during the 10th century.^[3]

The manuscript was rebound in 1962 by Roger Powell; it was then discovered that the pages had been trimmed during the rebinding of 1707, and the manuscript had been cut into single leaves in the rebinding of 1862. In 2010, Bill Endres, then at the University of Kentucky, led efforts to digitise the manuscript.^[4][5]

In 2014, Endres returned to Lichfield Cathedral and used Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to capture the drypoint writing in the Lichfield Gospels. One drypoint entry on p. 226 shows the contributions of women during the early medieval period: its listing of three Anglo-Saxon female names suggests that women worked in the scriptorium at Lichfield.^[6][7]