St Augustine Gospels

The St Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Lib. MS. 286) is an illuminated Gospel Book which dates from the 6th century and has been in the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 1575. It was made in Italy and has been in England since fairly soon after its creation; by the 16th century it had probably already been at Canterbury for almost a thousand years. It has 265 leaves measuring about 252 x 196 mm,^[1] and is not entirely complete, in particular missing pages with miniatures.

This manuscript is the oldest surviving illustrated Latin (rather than Greek or Syriac) Gospel Book,^[2] and one of the oldest European books in existence. Although the only surviving illuminations are two full-page miniatures, these are of great significance in art history as so few comparable images have survived. "When this manuscript was made, Latin was still generally spoken, and Jerome [author of the Vulgate translation, of which this text is a copy], who died in 420, was then no more distant in time than (say) Walter Scott or Emily Brontë are to us."^[3]

The Church of England calls the book the Canterbury Gospels, though to scholars this name usually refers to another book, an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon gospel book written at Canterbury, now with one portion in the British Library as Royal MS 1 E VI, and another in the Library of Canterbury Cathedral.