The Book of Kells may be the ‘most famous medieval manuscript in the world’, but Trinity’s library is home to over six hundred other medieval manuscripts, ranging in date from the fifth century to the sixteenth and in origin from across Western Europe and containing languages from Latin to Greek to Old Irish, Old English, Welsh, German Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Provencal and Vaudois.
‘Beyond the Book of Kells’ was a year-long lecture series that I ran in 2017-8 which aimed to draw public attention to these rich holdings. You can read my introduction to the series published in The Irish Times here or watch me discuss two of the manuscripts here. Details of the individual lectures are available here, a page that also has recordings of most of them, including my own lecture on TCD MS 492, a twelfth-century Bede from Bury.
Mark Faulkner 