A new theory challenges the origin story of one of the world’s most famous medieval texts.
Renowned for its exquisite illustrations and calligraphy, The Book of Kells has long been believed to have originated on the island of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides, before moving to Ireland in the 9th century. But a new theory suggests the book may have emerged from a Pictish monastery in Portmahomack, on Scotland’s northeast coast. The monastery’s productions stand out as “exceptionally literate and book-orientated,” whereas works traced to Iona tended to “plainness and legibility,” the academic Victoria Whitworth argued.
Because there are no surviving manuscripts formally credited to the Picts, Whitworth’s thesis complicates a long-held view of the group as “remote and backward,” The Guardian wrote.