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The donor of the Book of Kells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

William O’Sullivan
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Extract

Since the publication of Rev. Professor Aubrey Gwynn’s study of the later history of the Book of Kells the name of the donor of the book to Trinity College has come to light. He was Henry Jones (1605-82), eldest son of Lewis Jones, bishop of Killaloe, and was successively bishop of Clogher (1645), scoutmaster general to Cromwell’s army, and bishop of Meath (1661). In 1646 he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Dublin, a position he seems to have continued to hold under the commonwealth. He was already known as a benefactor of Trinity College Library. The two handsome oak staircases from the old library which now lead to the Long Room gallery were traditionally associated with him. He was remembered as the donor of the Book of Durrow but it was strangely forgotten that he had also given Trinity the Book of Kells, which is in our eyes so much more striking a volume because so much more lavishly illuminated. Perhaps it was the silver shrine in which Durrow was still preserved that touched the imagination of his contemporaries.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 41 , March 1958 , pp. 5 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1958

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References

1 ‘Some notes on the history of the Book of Kells’, in I.H.S., ix. 131-61 (Sept. 1954).

2 Durrow is described in the Catalogue of MSS, 1688 (MS D 1. 6) as ‘Quatuor Evangelia 4° membr. maximae antiquitatis; hic liber habet operimentum affabre confectum ex laminis argenteis; quod fieri curavit Flannius filius Malachiae rex Hiberniae qui vixit circa an. 961; ut patet literis Hibernicis in altera ejus parte transversim scriptis’. The shrine disappeared during the Williamite wars.

3 F.T.C.D., 1668; professor of divinity, 1678-92; bishop of Cloyne, 1693; archbishop of Cashel, 1694; one of the greatest benefactors the library has known.

4 F.T.C.D., 1662-6; Camden professor of history in the University of Oxford, 1668; retired as a non-juror, 1691.

5 Tanner letters, ed. Charles MacNeill (Ir. MSS Comm.), p. 440. The original letter which at this point MacNeill transcribed verbatim is now Bodleian MS Tanner 36, ff. 12-13.

6 Ussher’s Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (Dublin, 1639) is better known by its dropped title: ‘De Britannicarum ecclesiarum primordiis’. The two little volumes of collations are not now known to survive and were probably lost from Ussher’s baggage when he was attacked by the parliamentarians in Wales (Life by C. R. Elrington in Ussher’s Works, 1. 243), as this seems to have been the occasion when he lost the New Testament collations he had made from Oxford manuscripts (ibid., p. 245).

7 Lists of losses in MS D 1. 6, f. 1.

8 Letters of eminent literary men, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society, xxiii), pp. 295-8.