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Eadfrith: Scribe of Lindisfarne
This is the tale of the making of a masterwork, a landmark in the human journey — the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the world’s most beautiful and intriguing illuminated manuscripts.
In an age of battle-hardened Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and British warriors, all vying for power after the Roman Empire’s collapse, a hero unsung by bards took up his pen and entered the desert of the book to change the world.
This is an imagining of his life, his loves, his work, and his world, by an author who, in her academic alias, is well-versed in researching and sharing her passion for the transformative, scintillating ‘not so Dark Ages’.
In an age of battle-hardened Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and British warriors, all vying for power after the Roman Empire’s collapse, a hero unsung by bards took up his pen and entered the desert of the book to change the world.
This is an imagining of his life, his loves, his work, and his world, by an author who, in her academic alias, is well-versed in researching and sharing her passion for the transformative, scintillating ‘not so Dark Ages’.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
150 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2014
1 person is currently reading
334 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 16, 2014
I have just finished reading 'Eadfrith' and after the fact read a recent review by 'Ashley' noted above. Ashley's review did make me think and provokes this commentary. While all of us are entitled to our own opinion, as a general reader of materials from the period, I found the book a most enjoyable 'read' fitting neatly within the genre of historical literature, ( Max Adam's "King of the North, Melvyn Bragg's "Credo" and Nicola Griffith's "Hild") recently published.
Brown's first novel written under the pen Name Treeve to distinguish her scholarship from entertaining literature certainly is a new and different tool to educate; Brown knows her era and provides a different vehicle to compliment her scholarly work in 'the Lindisfarne Gospels', 'How Christianity came to Britain', and my favourite 'the Book and the Transformation of Britain"
I recommend 'Eadfrith' to the reader that wishes to expand their knowledge of the era when Christianity took form for today's age. I particularly liked the manner in which she chooses to explain the complex method in which the Lindisfarne Gospel was created and the subtle nuances that only come to be known by the distinguished scholarship that sets Brown/Treeve apart from the average historical novelist.
Wallace Johnson
Brown's first novel written under the pen Name Treeve to distinguish her scholarship from entertaining literature certainly is a new and different tool to educate; Brown knows her era and provides a different vehicle to compliment her scholarly work in 'the Lindisfarne Gospels', 'How Christianity came to Britain', and my favourite 'the Book and the Transformation of Britain"
I recommend 'Eadfrith' to the reader that wishes to expand their knowledge of the era when Christianity took form for today's age. I particularly liked the manner in which she chooses to explain the complex method in which the Lindisfarne Gospel was created and the subtle nuances that only come to be known by the distinguished scholarship that sets Brown/Treeve apart from the average historical novelist.
Wallace Johnson
January 12, 2021
Good topic...but a bit too many sidelines of history for me.
October 31, 2014
“This is the story of the extraordinary making of one of the greatest, most beautiful books the world has ever known.” Thus begins the prologue to ‘Eadfrith – Scribe of Lindisfarne’ and this book ‘does exactly what it says on the tin.’ The Lindisfarne Gospels is not just one of the world’s greatest and most beautiful books, it is also an incredibly complex work of art and telling its story is an equally complex challenge.
This literary ‘faction’ is not light entertainment, neither does it set out to give us a simplified evocation of the period, some sort of leisurely ‘time-travelogue’ or period soap-opera. This book does give us insights into this era and does entertain, in a profound way, but these achievements are incidental to its primary purpose - unravelling the complex multi-cultural strands that have influenced the creation of the art of Lindisfarne. Influences from as far afield as The Holy Land, Coptic Egypt and Ethiopia somehow reached a scribe-artist on tiny Holy Island at the turn of the eighth century. The author convincingly leads us through the routes by which these influences may have reached the shores of Northumbria. However, a more significant achievement is that she leads us inside this pioneering early medieval artist’s mind, navigating channels of knowledge, theology and imaginative vision as he assimilates the disparate patterns, motifs and styles, blending them coherently as he forges a new art form for a dawning age.
The momentous events, the monuments, ruins, relics, facts and artefacts of the period are interwoven with the lives of the various characters, many of whom were themselves historical individuals. Where necessary characters and events are invented to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the period. Among these is Osgyth, a character inspired by a contemporary burial slab with her name inscribed in both Runic and Latin script. She is the youthful amour of our hero and their tender love story flows through the narrative adding a very human dimension to his character. Our historical knowledge of the era is limited and almost nothing is known of Eadfrith but the author succeeds in penning a very credible portrait. This gives us insights into the life and mind of a passionate artist-scribe as he creates a complex masterpiece against the backdrop of an often turbulent and violent period. This book demands that we revise our simplistic notion of this period as a primitive, barbaric ‘Dark Age’.
A book such as this can only be written by a scholar who has devoted her life to pioneering scholarship of the period and especially its manuscripts. It is loaded with the author’s accumulated knowledge – a treasure chest of riches that handsomely repays a second reading. It is one of the worst-kept secrets that the author Treeve is the nom de plume of Michelle P. Brown, one of the foremost scholars of the Insular world. On the cover her tongue-in-cheek recommendation of her alter-ego’s book states that ‘she could not have written a better work’ adding a humourous touch to a work that significantly complements her many scholarly publications.
This literary ‘faction’ is not light entertainment, neither does it set out to give us a simplified evocation of the period, some sort of leisurely ‘time-travelogue’ or period soap-opera. This book does give us insights into this era and does entertain, in a profound way, but these achievements are incidental to its primary purpose - unravelling the complex multi-cultural strands that have influenced the creation of the art of Lindisfarne. Influences from as far afield as The Holy Land, Coptic Egypt and Ethiopia somehow reached a scribe-artist on tiny Holy Island at the turn of the eighth century. The author convincingly leads us through the routes by which these influences may have reached the shores of Northumbria. However, a more significant achievement is that she leads us inside this pioneering early medieval artist’s mind, navigating channels of knowledge, theology and imaginative vision as he assimilates the disparate patterns, motifs and styles, blending them coherently as he forges a new art form for a dawning age.
The momentous events, the monuments, ruins, relics, facts and artefacts of the period are interwoven with the lives of the various characters, many of whom were themselves historical individuals. Where necessary characters and events are invented to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the period. Among these is Osgyth, a character inspired by a contemporary burial slab with her name inscribed in both Runic and Latin script. She is the youthful amour of our hero and their tender love story flows through the narrative adding a very human dimension to his character. Our historical knowledge of the era is limited and almost nothing is known of Eadfrith but the author succeeds in penning a very credible portrait. This gives us insights into the life and mind of a passionate artist-scribe as he creates a complex masterpiece against the backdrop of an often turbulent and violent period. This book demands that we revise our simplistic notion of this period as a primitive, barbaric ‘Dark Age’.
A book such as this can only be written by a scholar who has devoted her life to pioneering scholarship of the period and especially its manuscripts. It is loaded with the author’s accumulated knowledge – a treasure chest of riches that handsomely repays a second reading. It is one of the worst-kept secrets that the author Treeve is the nom de plume of Michelle P. Brown, one of the foremost scholars of the Insular world. On the cover her tongue-in-cheek recommendation of her alter-ego’s book states that ‘she could not have written a better work’ adding a humourous touch to a work that significantly complements her many scholarly publications.
August 13, 2016
I received a free copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads program. Even though the book is only 150 pages long, I struggled to finish. I only managed to do so because I felt that the review should be written on the book as a whole.
If you are interested in the Lindisfarne Gospels and cannot make the trip to the British Library to see the book and the accompanying exhibit, then this is the book for you. The author took all of the knowledge she has gained from her academic research and has made it more accessible to the general public in a short book. She describes many objects and processes that would have been commonplace at the time but have been forgotten in modern times to provide a sense of what Eadfrith, the central person of the work, probably would have experienced in his daily life.
However, I would only recommend this book to someone with a passionate interest in the topic. If you enjoy historical fiction as a general genre and are thinking of picking up this book as a way to learn about a period of time through the author’s imagination, I would definitely pass. First of all, the 5 star review posted by Bagwyn Books (the publisher) on behalf of Michelle P. Brown is disingenuous: Michelle Treeve is Brown’s non-academic pen name. Not only does this skew the ratings, but reviewing your own work under a different name is in poor taste. The first paragraph of page 1 has a glaring typo which leads me to believe that nobody edited this book prior to publication. Treeve uses Roman numerals to indicate the years in which the chapters take place which, besides being irritating, are often incorrect: “DCIXC” does not follow modern conventions. Even if that is how numerals were written in the seventh and eighth centuries, the author is writing for modern audiences who were taught the modern conventions.
The characters are not actual characters as much as convenient vehicles for Treeve to dump as much knowledge as she can into very few pages. It’s so bad that I hesitate to call them “characters” but it’s the best option I can think of. Whenever she wants to show off a particular tidbit, one of the characters will mention having heard about an important historical event then proceed to describe it in great detail through dialogue. All of the information presented in this book was delivered in the same heavy-handed manner. This is not a smooth story showcasing the author’s imagining of Eadfrith’s life. Instead, this book is 150 pages of awkwardly jumping from one tidbit of knowledge to the next with the characters serving as means to deliver the knowledge rather than entities in and of themselves.
This book may be more accessible and affordable than the author’s academic works, but the academic works probably induce less eye rolling than this book.
If you are interested in the Lindisfarne Gospels and cannot make the trip to the British Library to see the book and the accompanying exhibit, then this is the book for you. The author took all of the knowledge she has gained from her academic research and has made it more accessible to the general public in a short book. She describes many objects and processes that would have been commonplace at the time but have been forgotten in modern times to provide a sense of what Eadfrith, the central person of the work, probably would have experienced in his daily life.
However, I would only recommend this book to someone with a passionate interest in the topic. If you enjoy historical fiction as a general genre and are thinking of picking up this book as a way to learn about a period of time through the author’s imagination, I would definitely pass. First of all, the 5 star review posted by Bagwyn Books (the publisher) on behalf of Michelle P. Brown is disingenuous: Michelle Treeve is Brown’s non-academic pen name. Not only does this skew the ratings, but reviewing your own work under a different name is in poor taste. The first paragraph of page 1 has a glaring typo which leads me to believe that nobody edited this book prior to publication. Treeve uses Roman numerals to indicate the years in which the chapters take place which, besides being irritating, are often incorrect: “DCIXC” does not follow modern conventions. Even if that is how numerals were written in the seventh and eighth centuries, the author is writing for modern audiences who were taught the modern conventions.
The characters are not actual characters as much as convenient vehicles for Treeve to dump as much knowledge as she can into very few pages. It’s so bad that I hesitate to call them “characters” but it’s the best option I can think of. Whenever she wants to show off a particular tidbit, one of the characters will mention having heard about an important historical event then proceed to describe it in great detail through dialogue. All of the information presented in this book was delivered in the same heavy-handed manner. This is not a smooth story showcasing the author’s imagining of Eadfrith’s life. Instead, this book is 150 pages of awkwardly jumping from one tidbit of knowledge to the next with the characters serving as means to deliver the knowledge rather than entities in and of themselves.
This book may be more accessible and affordable than the author’s academic works, but the academic works probably induce less eye rolling than this book.
February 11, 2015
"I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads”
Right how to explain my 2 stars. This is not the normal reading genre I go for but living by the never judge a book by it's cover I read this book with an open mind. The first 100 pages I found to be a bit tedious and I was struggling to keep my mind on what I was reading. I think this was due to not exactly knowing what or anything about Eadfrith and the Lindisfarne Gospels, before I started in hinds sight I should of perhaps done a quick bit of research into it so that I could have appreciated it more. However I got more into the story in the last 50 pages of this book, as it focused on the creation and development of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I'd now just like to fully acknowledge and accommodate Treeve on the amount of obvious long hours of well worth research that she has put into the creation of this detailed book, that I'd describe as Faction, factually based fiction.
Right how to explain my 2 stars. This is not the normal reading genre I go for but living by the never judge a book by it's cover I read this book with an open mind. The first 100 pages I found to be a bit tedious and I was struggling to keep my mind on what I was reading. I think this was due to not exactly knowing what or anything about Eadfrith and the Lindisfarne Gospels, before I started in hinds sight I should of perhaps done a quick bit of research into it so that I could have appreciated it more. However I got more into the story in the last 50 pages of this book, as it focused on the creation and development of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I'd now just like to fully acknowledge and accommodate Treeve on the amount of obvious long hours of well worth research that she has put into the creation of this detailed book, that I'd describe as Faction, factually based fiction.
April 23, 2014
Leading academic expert on the subject, Professor Michelle P. Brown, writes:
A well-researched account of what we can retrieve, through scholarship, of the making of one of the world's great cultural landmarks and its age - and a sensitive evocation of what we cannot know. I could not have written a better work of what I would call 'faction', that is, factually based fiction.
A well-researched account of what we can retrieve, through scholarship, of the making of one of the world's great cultural landmarks and its age - and a sensitive evocation of what we cannot know. I could not have written a better work of what I would call 'faction', that is, factually based fiction.
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