These Medieval Monks Scribbled Notes in the Margins of Their Books More Than 1,000 Years Ago
A new exhibition in Dublin showcases historic manuscripts written in Irish monasteries. The show also features medieval artifacts, such as a rare book shrine found in a river in the 1980s
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In the early Middle Ages, Irish monks transported an important collection of texts to continental Europe. Written during Ireland’s golden age (between the sixth and ninth centuries), the manuscripts included scripture, encyclopedic volumes and language manuals, according to the Guardian’s Rory Carroll.
Now, for the first time in 1,000 years, some of those long-departed texts have returned to Ireland. They will be displayed in a new exhibition alongside medieval artifacts, such as an intricately decorated book shrine recovered from a lake decades ago.
“Words on the Wave: Ireland and St. Gallen in Early Medieval Europe” at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin features 17 Irish manuscripts. The texts are on loan from the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland—one of the countries the monks traveled to from Ireland. Curators say the exhibition spotlights unique connections between continental Europe and the British Isles.
Need to know: When Christianity came to Ireland
- After Christianity arrived in Ireland in the fifth century, a network of monasteries emerged.
- Beginning in the eighth century, Vikings began raiding some of these monasteries.
“What we’re trying to do is to retrace those journeys and the world in which those manuscripts were produced,” exhibition curator Matthew Seaver tells the Guardian. “These books are key to an understanding of ourselves, our language and our links with the continent.”
One of the manuscripts on view in the exhibition is the oldest known copy of Etymologiae. Written by an Irish scribe in the seventh century and later brought to Switzerland, the book is an encyclopedia of word origins that the museum calls “a veritable internet of the ancient world.”
Irish monks took the manuscripts to continental Europe to protect them from raiding Vikings and to promote cultural exchange, as Seaver tells the Guardian. “It was a two-way street,” he says. “From an early stage, Ireland was receiving books and scholars from the continent and Anglo-Saxon England.”/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cd/43/cd434659-5b70-47e2-b547-c91dfcf1ded1/508892175_1171231511705728_3701388166900156740_n.jpeg)
The texts aren’t valuable only for their original contents. In a guide to Latin grammar, the margins are filled with scribes’ mundane notes, providing small clues about their everyday lives. As the Guardian reports, one scribe wrote that he was “ale-killed” (hungover), while others complained of cold weather or “bad ink.” Another expressed hope that Vikings wouldn’t attack that night, writing, “Bitter is the wind tonight, it tosses the ocean’s white hair: I fear not the coursing of a clear sea by the fierce heroes from Lothlend.” The seafaring Scandinavians began raiding Ireland in search of goods in the eighth century.
The books are “full of human voices, humor, frustration and resilience, offering us a rare and very real glimpse into the daily lives and personalities of early medieval Irish monks,” Seaver tells the Guardian.
Other artifacts on view in the exhibition include the Lough Kinale Book Shrine. Book shrines are elaborate containers made to hold sacred books often associated with saints, and only eight from medieval Ireland are known to exist today. The Lough Kinale shrine was found on the bottom of an Irish lake in 1986, and it’s undergone 39 years of painstaking conservation at the National Museum of Ireland.
“The box was permanently sealed, with no direct access to the contents,” Paul Mullarkey, a conservator at the museum, tells the Irish Times. “Its importance lies in that we have a shrine that has not undergone modification or repairs and we can see what the other book shrines have lost.”
The shrine is about the size of a telephone book, Mullarkey adds. Made of an oak box and bronze plates, it’s decorated with a large cross, studs, medallions and engraved patterns. Its snake head-shaped hinges once held a thick leather strap. After the shrine emerged in pieces from the lake, it was displayed for six months in a tank of water before conservators began the decades-long preservation process.
“There is a sense of satisfaction and relief that the shrine is now available for the public to view and appreciate,” Mullarkey tells the Irish Times.
“Words on the Wave: Ireland and St. Gallen in Early Medieval Europe” is on view at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin through October 24, 2025.
