The Book of Kells

Bernard Meehan was the former Head of Research Collections at Trinity College Dublin, the institution that holds and displays the Book of Kells, and this Thames & Hudson book is his standard modern scholarly account of the manuscript's production, decoration and history. Its strength is direct professional access to the manuscript itself over a long career at its custodian institution, combined with genuine art-historical scholarship rather than only a custodian's descriptive account. Its limit is that as the standard general account it necessarily summarizes a manuscript studied in exhaustive folio-by-folio detail elsewhere, so a claim needing analysis of one specific page or ornamental detail is better served by a focused specialist study.