TCNJ

23 WINTER 2019 let go. When she arrived at the University of Toronto, she immersed herself in the early Middle Ages. She cast a wide net, studying not only medieval Latin and history but also art and theology. No matter the class, she noticed that the story of the Codex Amiatinus, an eighth-century Bible created in Anglo-Saxon England, kept cropping up. This Bible — and particularly the lives of the monks who created it — intrigued Chazelle. Much had been written about its parts: the text, the illustrations, the journey of the Bible itself. But there was no book that pulled everything together in one place. Much of the big picture remained a mystery. "I like those kinds of puzzles," Chazelle says. "Why was it made? What was the artist trying to convey? What were the sources of inspiration?" Amiatinus floated at the back of her mind for years: as she earned her master's degree and PhD at Yale; as she arrived at TCNJ in 1992 and built a career in the history department; and as she steeped herself in early medieval culture, from art and faith and intellectual life to Anglo-Saxon England's most famous historian, the Venerable Bede. All threads kept leading Chazelle back to Amiatinus until she couldn't ignore it any longer. Her curiosity has resulted in The Codex Amiatinus and its "Sister" Bibles: Scripture, Liturgy, and Art in the Milieu of the Venerable Bede. Scheduled to be published in 2019, it will be the first comprehensive book on Amiatinus. If the 2,060-page Bible could speak, the stories it might tell are endless: of its beginnings in the Kingdom of Northumbria as one of three Bibles commissioned by Ceolfrid, the abbot of two neighboring monasteries known as Wearmouth- Jarrow; of the hundreds of animal skins turned into parchment for its pages and decorated with paints made from vegetable dye and flecks of gold; and of the lives lived, in days and months and years, by the seven scribes who wrote it. And this was only the beginning of the extraordinary Bible's tale. It was chosen to be sent to Rome as a gift for Pope Gregory II. And so, in 716, Ceolfrid and his monks set off on foot for a journey that would take them over water and mountain and more than a thousand miles, carrying Amiatinus with them. The departure spared it the fate of many English manuscripts — including the other two Bibles made at the monastery — which were destroyed or scattered across the country in pieces during the Viking invasion. Ceolfrid died en route, but Amiatinus made it to Italy and eventually surfaced in a monastery in Mount Amiata in Tuscany. In 1785, it was acquired by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. David Ganz, an emeritus professor of paleography living in Cambridge, England, calls Amiatinus' survival amazing. "For Anglo-Saxon England, there are plenty of gospel books and books of psalms," Ganz says. "For the rest of the Bible, though, it's a handful of fragments. Because Celia Chazelle has read all the work of the Venerable Bede in Latin.

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