MAY
Introducing
MAY 2025
May – a month when, in the north, we can hope to see leaves unfurled, blossom and blue sky, as well as being the month dedicated to the Virgin Mary – is the celebration of the feast days (on the 25th) for the Venerable Bede (see LITERATURE) and (on the 4th) for Saint Conleth. Both men were monks of medieval Christianity, Saint Conleth (450-519) an Irish hermit, and Bede (673 – 735) a Northumbrian writer and educator.
The two introduce a theme for this month of the dedication and isolation which perhaps is a sine qua non in the mental makeup of those who find themselves with something significant to impart, a something of foundational importance which entails living out a special destiny.
Both holy men worked with examples of early illuminated manuscripts, Conleth also bringing to his vocation his considerable skill as a metalworker. In the collage section on the HOME page see the image of the crosier of Clonmacnoise, held in Dublin’s National Museum of Ireland, which is of similar style to the crosier (a ceremonial staff for Bishops) which Conleth fashioned for Saint Finbar of Temon Barry.
In LITERATURE Bede’s life and work is linked with the life of Saint Cuthbert and the lead-in to Northumbria’s Golden Age. Two recently published books with a focus on monastic life in the years around 700, one scholarly, one fictional, provide comprehensive background on how and why, despite the humility with which the two men conducted themselves, the impact they made was so profound – and permanent.
Then the PEOPLE section is privileged to have a contribution from the scholar in question, acclaimed expert on illuminated manuscripts, Professor Michelle P Brown, who has provided us with her answers to Six Questions on the Sacred.
Our sacred PLACE this month is an outpost in the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland, The Skelligs. Also foundational for Western Christianity in its earliest centuries, today the deserted monastery on Skellig Michael is a destination for the intrepid, described as ‘an inhospitable rock which rises sensationally 715 feet above the Atlantic.’
Finally NOTES AND JOTTINGS mixes different approaches by religious leaders and poets across the ages as they puzzle one of the fundamental existential questions: how to weigh the loneliness that stems from the experience of living apart from the world against the benefits of choosing to serve humanity in the way you’re convinced is ideal.
ART OF THE MONTH
ALTARPIECE of MARY, PANAGIA MESOPANTISISA
In the calendar: In the Catholic church the entire month of May is devoted to the Virgin Mary who, as the Queen of Heaven, is honoured with special observances and often ceremoniously crowned and garlanded with flowers.
The frame of reference: The Salute, the imposing church on the Grand Canal in Venice which houses the C13th century icon in our image, was designed by Baldassare Longhena. Dedicated to the Virgin, it was built in the shape of a crown, elevated on grand entrance steps. Begun in 1630, it represented a plea to Mary as ‘Our Lady of Health’ to intercede and protect the city against further threat of disease after that year’s devastating plague. The icon is honoured every year when on 21 November thousands of candles are placed by Venice’s population around the Baroque high altar.
The painting: The work is C13th Byzantine, a tempera on wood icon, brought to Venice by Doge Francesco Morosoni in 1669 from Candia in Crete, as the island was falling to the Ottoman Turks. Mary is magnificently crowned, as is the infant Jesus, both adorned in gold in the Greek style, both shown as having dark skin. Mary’s depiction is as the Mediator, the Panagia Mesopantisisa. She is revered as a Black Madonna, a style originating in the medieval era and much copied – as many as five hundred exist in Europe alone, often associated with miracles and attracting pilgrims to their locations. The Bible’s The Song of Solomon (Chapter 1, verse 5) references black beauty, ‘I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.’ Was the Salute’s Madonna always so dark, or has candle smoke over the ages dimmed her complexion?
The artist: We shall never know the answer to the question above, nor learn the name of the work’s artist - although we can surmise, as there’s well-documented linkages existing between the medieval icon-writers in Crete, the monastery of Saint Catherine’s in the Sinai desert and the artistic/collector community in Venice. The Italo-Byzantine stylepoints the icon displays: the subjects’ front-facing static positioning, the solemnity of their expressions, the heavy use of gold – textured, almost embossed – in the background, dominated Italian painting until the end of the C13th. (This is evidenced in the London National Gallery’s current ‘Siena 1300-1350’ exhibition which showcases the influences on/innovatory adaptions of the style by Duccio of Siena (1268-1311)). The style was only truly left behind as painting by Cimabue and Giotto heralded the Renaissance era with its new directions in art.
LITERATURE
SAINT CUTHBERT (634 - 687) and THE VENERABLE BEDE (673-735)
What a confluence was this – within forty years of each other two boys are born who, through their Christian scholarship, will take up religious leadership in the Northumbria of the late C7th, a pre-literate Northumbria to which their influence contributed in such a way that it emerged into a ‘Golden Age’ of writing and illuminated manuscripts. Within a century, Viking raiders were to wreak the havoc and destruction that was to all but extinguish these fragile flickers of civilisation, division once again ruling the land.
Nevertheless, in their adulthood, the preaching and writing of these two men were to make indelible marks on the religious life of Britain. Sanctified and venerated, Bede and Cuthbert will stand for all time as the most appreciated for their learning, piety and courage among the pantheon of the ‘Northern Saints’.
Today their burial places can be visited in Durham Cathedral, the image below displaying the grandeur of St Cuthbert’s memorial, a shrine created for him in 1104 at the high altar. www.durhamworldheritagesite.com
And what luck in timing, in that two recently published books fill in all the background one could need on this subject. Read on below for details of the novel Cuddy (London, Bloomsbury 2024) by Benjamin Myers, and of Michelle P Brown’s definitive scholarship Bede and the Theory of Everything (London, Reaktion Books 2023)
First, the factual background:
Saint Cuthbert was born in 634, in Northumbria. Probably from a noble family, he was educated in the Celtic tradition, inspired while still only a child to a religious life by a vision of Saint Aidan. He was first a monk at Melrose, Ripon before joining the monastery of the remote island, Lindisfarne, where he was made prior, and early became renowned for his preaching, healing and miracles.
Cuthbert was drawn however, to the contemplative life of a hermit, retiring from active life in 676 to live on an even remoter island, Inner Farne. Here Cuthbert befriended the animals, the seals and birds, protecting the eider ducks, now locally known as Cuddy’s (Cuthbert’s) ducks.
In 685, called out of solitude he became a bishop, an appointment lasting only two years. While active in the pastoral ministry he’d be away from his monastery for weeks, preaching and teaching.
Cuthbert, as described by the historian Bede, looking back in the 700s at the life of the humble monk who inspired him, wrote in his great work of Latin poetry The Life of Saint Cuthbert, ‘[he] strove to convert people for miles around from their foolish ways to a delight in the promised joys of heaven.’
In 687, anticipating his life was ending, Cuthbert returned to Farne. After his death his body was brought by the monks to Lindisfarne and buried there. Miracles of healing were reported, indicative of Cuthbert’s holiness. Twelve years later, the monks opening his coffin were amazed to find Cuthbert’s body intact and undecayed – a sign of great sainthood. The fame of Cuthbert’s shrine spreading far and wide, visits from pilgrims increased.
By 875, with the unceasing savage Viking attacks intensifying (Jarrow Abbey having been destroyed in 860) the monks decided to leave, taking Cuthbert’s body to the mainland, where for the following 120 years it was carried across the region in search of a safe haven, to finally settle in Durham in 995. In the second decade of the C11th century the construction began of Durham’s massive Romanesque cathedral and monastic complex honouring Cuthbert, which still stand as his memorial today.
Here’s how Benjamin Myers opens his novel Cuddy with a description of Saint Cuthbert written as verse, one of the interspersed poetic passages he uses to great effect,
‘…later a wandering herder of lost souls
and man of great visions and miracles
and more latterly first Bishopric of Lindisfarne
then hermit on a large rock
then hermit on a small rock
then a corpse in a stone box
Cuddy’
Reviewers have called Cuddy an ‘enchanting’ book and it is certainly easy to fall under the spell of Myers’ writing. Compounded by his use of dialect, one’s reading is dictated somehow by the rhythm of the walking pace of the changing groups of Cuthbert’s loyal accompanists on the tough trek they undertook across the miles and across the years.
The book’s chapters resemble a north country relay race by these groups, the ‘baton’ of Cuthbert’s body being handed for safekeeping, one to another. Myers introduces a modern sequence as the book’s finale, a chapter both poignant and relevant as through this story the reader is confronted with today’s realities for young people.
Much of what we know of Cuthbert came from Bede, known as the Venerable Bede. Born in 673, from earliest youth Bede was dedicated to learning, spending his days in prayer and study as a monk at Wearmouth and Jarrow monasteries. Bede wrote another Life of Cuthbert, this one in prose, around the year 721, researching the stories of Cuthbert and the other saints of his time. He also wrote about them in his famous History of the English Church and People, for which remarkable work of scholarship, just one of Bede’s many writings, he is often known as the ‘first English historian.’
As Michelle P. Brown writes in her comprehensive book Bede and the Theory of Everything ‘Bede recreated Cuthbert as an indigenous hero for the Christian age .. capable of spiritual and physical endurance …a home-grown father of the church; and a domestic soul-friend of the hearthside – the Saint Cuddy who is still spoken of affectionately as a family member in so many Northumbria households today.’
Bede in his lifetime did not venture any significant distance from his monastery – but in his mind, he was a constant traveller. Brown details the truly remarkable depth and breadth of his research and original scholarship, informing us that, beyond subjects such as the measurement of time, he had an interest in poetry and song in his own language, Old English. And that, far from introspective, he was outward-turning and altruistic, in that he spent his last hours translating John’s Gospel into Old English ‘to instruct and evangelize his people in their own tongue, adding that people learn better that way…’
In this way Brown emphasises how the essential warm humanity of Bede as a man, his verve and a true joy in life, were always in tandem with the penetrating power of his scholarly intellect, his curiosity and his drive to innovate.
As to his place in history, Brown quotes Professor Calvin B Kendall’s statement from his chapter on Bede and education in the Cambridge Companion to Bede (Cambridge 2010), ‘Bede’s importance as an educator is that he embodied an alternative model of Christian monasticism .. the educated as opposed to the ascetic … In validating the life of the mind and the importance of education, his model helped to redirect the course of Western civilisation.’
PEOPLE
MICHELLE P. BROWN (1959 - )
This 2003 image shows Professor Michelle Brown placing the British Library’s digital fine art facsimile version of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which, as its first digital curator, she had been responsible for coordinating, on Durham Cathedral’s tomb of Saint Cuthbert
Michelle P. Brown FSA is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. From 1986-2011 she was Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, and latterly one of its first digital curators (part-time). From 2005 she also served as Tutor in the History of the Book at SAS and then as Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies.
Professor Brown has written, lectured and broadcast widely, acted as a historical consultant and on-screen expert in radio and television, and published prolifically, including seminal works on the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Luttrell Psalter, and the life of the Venerable Bede.
Her research interests include the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, the Conversion to Christianity, Biblical and Liturgical manuscripts, early relations between East and West (she is currently researching manuscripts at St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Early Christian cultures and manuscript illumination and its interpretation. Currently she also holds the title of Visiting Professor at University College London.
Former positions also include the Sandars Lecturer in Bibliography at Cambridge University; Leverhulme Fellow; Lay Canon and Chapter Member at St Paul’s Cathedral, London; Lay Canon at Truro Cathedral; Director of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust. She is also a Patron of the Society of Bookbinders and an Anglican Lay Worship Leader.
SIX QUESTIONS ON THE SACRED
My first encounter with Professor Brown was via an Arts Society lecture: she was speaking enthusiastically, rapturously even, on video, about the very early artefacts she’d been discovering in the moorland surrounding her remote house at Land’s End. The presentation of her material was as enthralling as it was authoritative. As a nearby Cornish neighbour at that time, I contrived subsequently to meet her, and found that this archaeological knowledge was just one of Michelle’s multiple areas of expertise. In my study of sacred art her book, the Lion Companion to Christian Art (London, Lion 2008) was the introductory essential reading for the M.Litt course. Below Michelle has provided details of her remarkable career and shared personal reflections on the pervasive power of earliest influences.
Q: Your writing is strongly visually-focussed eg Painted Labyrinth: the World of the Lindisfarne Gospels, The Luttrell Psalter and Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking – out of all the art you’ve studied do you have one image that stands out for you as speaking to/encapsulating your faith?
A: The image that, for me, most encapsulates the ability of art to provide a route into exploring and expressing my faith is the decorated opening to St Luke’s act of witness in the Lindisfarne Gospels. This spiritually and aesthetically inspired copy of the Gospels, a remarkably beautiful and carefully made manuscript was made by Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, the busy bishop undertaking much of the work on the tiny rocky islet, [known today] as ‘Cuddys Isle’, in the bay beside the monastery on Holy Island, founded in 635 by St Aidan and other followers of St Columba from Iona.
Each of the four Gospels opens with a miniature depicting the relevant evangelist and his symbol, followed by a diptych comprising the decorated opening words of the Gospel, in Latin, facing a cross embedded in a carpet-page (so named by art historians for a resemblance to oriental rugs, but which I suggest represents the prayer mats used in Anglo-Saxon England at this time.)
I have chosen the St Luke cross carpet-page. Each of the four carpet pages in The Gospels contains a cross at its centre representing four different traditions: Matthew has the Latin cross, Mark the Celtic ring-headed cross, Luke the Greek cross (befitting a Greek doctor) and John, the visionary, has Coptic /Ethiopic tau crosses. A fourfold harmony.
Q: Do you have a memory of the time and place you first understood the concept of ‘sacred’?
A: I was first fully aware of the sacred when, at age four, I was taken to see the Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Library, then housed in the British Museum, by my Northumbrian mother and Irish father. As I sat upon my Da’s shoulders and gazed at the manuscript I was awestruck. Feeling myself drawn inextricably into its web of interlace and the elemental swirl of its spirals, I entered the sacred space of the Book. That night, I wrote in my little girl diary that instead of being an astronaut, I would be a librarian – and I would sing the part of the song which had been revealed to me as mine to sing.
Q: Is there a favourite place you retreat to when seeking the opportunity for quiet reflection?
A: More than one: Holy Island or the other watery deserts of these isles; the shrines of Saints Cuthbert and Bede; my library.
Q: From an early age did you look ahead to choose a career path that would embody your faith or has there been an element of happenstance in how things have evolved?
A: Places and artworks have always been an attractive open portal to me into the inspiration and lessons of the past and, thereby, into a sense of identity in the present and a sense of purpose for the future. I visited them avidly throughout my formative years, with my parents as willing fellow-travellers.
I was to study fine art at Camberwell but decided, rather, to study art history. This only made sense to me in its historical context, however, and so my first degree was Combined Hons History and History of Art at Westfield College, University of London. I married in my second year and worked full-time during my PhD in Medieval Archaeology at University College London, co-supervised by my beloved Professor Julian Brown in Palaeography and Codicology at King’s College London – for I had decided already that medieval manuscripts were, for me, the most complex forms of evidence and inspiration.
Thus equipped, my first jobs in the field were part-time posts teaching at Birkbeck College, the University of London Extra-Mural Dept. and Morley College. Then came my ‘break’ as Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, where I eventually had the opportunity to study the Lindisfarne Gospels close up for a new digital fine art facsimile, for which I authored the commentary volume (also published as M. P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe) and in 2003 curated one of the British Library’s first major exhibitions, ‘Painted Labyrinth: the World of the Lindisfarne Gospels’.
I have been helping it and other inspirational works of faith to carry on reaching people ever since. I have been fortunate in combining this, where appropriate, with my role as an Anglican Lay Minister and Canon.
Q: What is the source of your greatest joy?
A: The love of God that I receive and try to reflect, and the blessings bestowed upon me, notably my marriage, my dog family, my extended human family, and the ability to learn and to rejoice in a wondrous, infinite Creation.
Q: What message for your students, readers and fans would you like to leave as your legacy?
A: Follow in the Footsteps, by the Grace of God, and help others to do likewise.
PLACE
THE SKELLIGS
Some fortyfive minutes’ boat ride off the coast of Kerry lie the Skelligs, two upstanding sheer rocks. ‘Skeilig’ is an Irish language word, meaning ‘splinter of rock.’ The larger of the two rocks, Skellig Michael, is where according to legend,the Archangel Michael appeared to St Patrick. From 600 – 1200 it was home to a monastery.
Isobel Colegate describes Skellig Michael in A Pelican in the Wilderness – Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses (London, HarperCollins 2002) as ‘an inhospitable rock ten miles or so off the tip of the Kerry coast in Ireland ..its summit covered with the rounded-topped, stone ‘beehive’ cells of the hermits of former times. Such is the perilous position of the furthest of the cells, exposed high on the steep rock, facing the Atlantic, that the imagination fails. They were not as we are, these particular saintly obsessives .. They were at the outermost limits, face to face with infinity.’
In his Sun Dancing – A Medieval Vision (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1997) Geoffrey Moorhouse elaborates, ‘Skellig Michael can only be gained across a lenient sea…if any kind of swell is running no boatman will go …know[ing] that a landing is impossible in the heave and surge of the Atlantic..’ Moorhouse does get there and he writes, ‘..nothing in my experience had prepared me for this huddle of domes, crouching half way to heaven in this all but inaccesible place, where it was easy to feel you had reached a limit of this world. A holy place, to be sure.’
I have been to Skellig Michael, taking the boat from Portmagee, almost Ireland’s most westerly point. I have clambered through the spray at the landing stage and set out to climb, in breathless, gasping stages, the 600 rock-hewn medieval steps that wend to the top, there to discover the six beehive cells, the two oratories, the cemetery, and the church where only the wall with the East window still stands. Windswept, sun-dazzled, vertiginous against the enormity of the emptiness of surrounding sea and sky, sensing myself far removed from everything of the everyday, I have been witness to an extreme form of Christian monasticism, to the tenacity of a faith upheld on this outpost – tenacity to which Sir Kenneth Clark in his 1969 Civilisation BBC2 series attributed the very survival of Western civilisation during the Dark Ages of European history.
Only years later, on the publication of Sun Dancing was I to get perspective on that tumultuous, wave-tossed day when my imagination too, had all but failed.
Sun Dancing is a clever, absorbing book in two sections: The Tradition and The Evidence.
Section 1 is a meditation on Celtic spirituality that takes the form of seven sequential fictional recreations of life on Skellig Michael, chapters which convey in a way that a dryly historical text couldn’t, how surviving on the rock exacted a punishing physical hardship, how it was only an astoundingly resolute and intense faith that could have sustained the monks in this harsh place that for seven centuries remained as an unwavering beacon far out on Europe’s western horizon.
Section 2, according to the author, is ‘a continuation of the narrative, meticulously-researched non-fiction writing enlarging on topics such as Irish peregrinations, the art of the early Desert Fathers, the Celtic genius for amalgamating pagan naturism with Christian theology, that are only just detectable beneath the surface of the earlier text.’
In Spaces for the Sacred (Canterbury, SCM Press 2001) Philip Sheldrake quotes archaeologist and historian Richard Morris, ‘the Christian monasticism.. [of the C4th Desert Fathers] originated in the kingdom of the scorpion and the hyena: a world of rock and heat .. The biographers of holy men in north-west Europe were to depict their subjects as seekers after landscapes and environments correspondingly forbidding.’ Inner spiritual combat should, according to Sheldrake, be undertaken in ‘a context of wilderness and empty space, freed from an identity provided by normal social ties.’ According to Colegate, those Egyptian desert hermits spoke of their ordeal of choice as ‘the white martyrdom of solitude in exile’, while she suggests the Irish Christians introduced the idea of a ‘green martyrdom of the hermit.’
There was little green in the far west of Ireland the summer of my extended stay at Cahirciveen on the mainland. The land was parched a burnt yellow ochre in September, after the long-drawn-out rainless weeks of a phenomenally hot and sunny spell, one of those that used to be marked in our minds forever, so unusual were the extended drought conditions. We spent our time hauling ourselves from a warm sea to bask on the rocks, baking like lazy seals.
But had weather like this hit the Skelligs in olden times how would they have fared out there under such conditions, the monks’ already limited possibilities for growing nutritious food now reduced even further?
As the nights cooled a little and the morning dews became heavy, of a morning we came out of our thatched cottage summer rental on the mainland to find the small fields sloping steeply either side of the bay carpeted with mushrooms – great big, pristine, beautiful mushrooms in startling quantities, more than enough to defy the appetites of even the greediest. Stirring soup and fricassees and more soup, our hope was that the brethren would have been equally blessed with such beneficent bounty.
NOTES AND JOTTINGS
The hermits… are well-trained; they go forth from the battle ranks of their brothers to the single-handed combat of the desert. Fearless…they with the help of God have within themselves the strength to fight bare-handed against the evil ways of flesh and thoughts
The Rule of Saint Benedict (480-547)
They ask me why I live in the green mountains
I smile and don’t reply; my heart’s at ease
Peach blossoms flow downstream, leaving no trace –
And there are other earths and skies than these
Li Bai (701 – 762)
A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the Hous Top and like a Pelican in the Wilderness
Thomas Traherne (1673-74)
When nothing was, then God was there; had nothing been, God would have been
My being has defeated me: had I not been, what would have been?
Mirza Ghalib (1797 – 1869)
I fear me this – is Loneliness
The Maker of the soul
Its Caverns and its Corridors
Illuminate – or seal
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
The treasure at the heart of the rose
is your own heart’s treasure,
Scatter it as the rose does:
your pain becomes hers to measure.
Scatter it in a song,
or in one great love’s desire.
Do not resist the rose
lest you burn in its fire
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)
RESOURCES
Colegate Isabel A Pelican in the Wilderness – Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses (London, HarperCollins 2002)
Sheldrake Philip Spaces for the Sacred (Canterbury, SCM Press 2001)
Moorhouse Geoffrey Sun Dancing – A Medieval Vision (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1997)
Jackson Eleanor The Lindisfarne Gospels – Art, History and Inspiration (London, The British Library 2022)
Arnold John H The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford, University Press 2014)
Schama Simon Landscape and Memory (London, HarperCollins 1996)
Hirshfield Jane Women in Praise of the Sacred – 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (New York, HarperCollins 1994)