Two facts about this manuscript reach well beyond the history of book decoration.
The first is in its pigments. Analysis has identified lapis lazuli in the palette. In about the year 700 lapis came from one place, the mountains of what is now Afghanistan, and it reached Northumbria across the whole width of the known world. A monastery on a tidal island off the coast of northern England, in a kingdom that had been pagan within living memory, was buying at the end of a supply line that ran to central Asia. Whatever else the Insular monasteries were, they were not isolated.
The second is between the lines. When Aldred added his colophon around 950 he also added something else: a word-by-word translation of the entire Latin text into Old English, written small above each line. It is the oldest surviving version of the gospels in the English language, and it predates the great Anglo-Saxon gospel translations. It was not made to replace the Latin, which stays dominant on the page, but to help a reader through it, which is a modest purpose for a document of that significance.
The community carried the book away from Lindisfarne after the Viking raids, along with Cuthbert's body, and wandered Northumbria for over a century before settling at Durham.