Making the Divine, Observing the Tactile: The Carpet Pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels as an Aesthetic of Paradox

Paulina Gąsiorowska, Brown University

The Lindisfarne Gospels – an illuminated manuscript produced by the bishop of the holy island of Lindisfarne, Eadfrith, most probably in the first half of the eighth century – are beautiful, and they are massive. Wonderfully rich in color, imagery, textuality, and texture, they are deeply complex in their material construction, aesthetic design, and process of making. Upon initial encounter, the codex begs to be seen in its full glory; each new page – out of over half a thousand – becomes a fresh source of transcendental awe. When beheld for a further moment, the manuscript tempts the touch; its wondrous size, its palpable weight, the brilliant, bulging gemstones of its front cover, and the weathered surfaces of its folios make the fingers itch even from behind the protective glass. They elicit the insatiable desire to analyze, to grasp, the book’s infinite treasury of holy knowledge and magnificent detail.

The Lindisfarne Gospels prompt an overwhelming sense of visual wonder and tactile delight. They provoke the beholder’s basic experiential curiosity but also command their reverence for the incomprehensible divine. They make us want to fully indulge our human senses while exposing our equally human incapacity for fully understanding the sacred. The manuscript’s dynamic movements between the Christian aspects of the infallible faith and the fallible body, coordinated with its fluctuations between the more abstract aesthetics of sight and the more tangible aesthetics of touch, appear paradoxical. How can one work of art embody both sacred ideals and human attributes? How can it simultaneously depict self-contained, analytic geometries alongside structures mimetic of the contingent external world? 

The answers to these questions are legible not from the actual text which dominates the codex’s 259 leaves of calfskin vellum, but rather out of its carpet pages – the five non-textual pages that decorate and guard the reader’s entrance to the text and into each of the four Gospels. These five carpet pages seamlessly incorporate the properties of mathematical divinity and elements of human imperfection. Their aesthetics immerse the beholder within a self-sufficient and introspective world of ‘pure’ ornament and of tangible, ‘touchable’ materials of metal, glass, and fabric. As such, the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, especially as illustrated by the carpet page of folio 2v (fig. 1), efficaciously embody the obscure and paradoxical principles that define the human relationship to the divinity of Christ and the Biblical mysteries. The pages express the Word of God without uttering a word, illuminating (as in decorating) the Scripture they safeguard while illuminating (as in revealing) its incomprehensibility.

The Book, the God, the Body

At first glance, the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels overwhelm the beholder with the beauty of their elegant geometrical precision, ever-multiplying complexity, and wealth of vibrant colors — a beauty that may feel impossible to have been produced by human hands. At another glance, one directed this time at investigating their genealogy — their execution by a single hand,¹ using only a compass, a straight edge (not even a ruler!), and a few natural pigments² — the carpet pages assume the status of marvel, if not miracle.

This initial impression, far from accidental, is attributable not simply to the analytic elegance of mathematics, but to the medieval appropriation of this science into Christian cosmogony. As stated in Wisdom 11:20, God “arranged all things by measure, by number, and by weight.” Taking this formulation literally, mostly thanks to the influence of the theology of St. Augustine, the medieval world interpreted numbers as the “structuring principle” of God’s Genesis, the essential reason why the cosmos can “operate in an orderly fashion.”³ After all, the universe can achieve physical form only if it is extended, quantifiable, and weighable. Both to be created and continue being created, the cosmos depends on geometry and arithmetic.

Thus, mathematical properties can be said to be “generative” of our world and, additionally, cosmologically traceable to God’s will.⁴ The carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, whose composition is founded upon geometric structures and modular repetitions of zoomorphic interlace, can be interpreted as a literal product of the cosmogenic vision of the divine. That is not only because they are physically positioned within the sacral sphere of Evangelical scripture, but because their aesthetics accord with divine numerological principles. 

For instance, the carpet page of folio 2v is inscribed into a rigidly delimited rectangle, whose corners are symmetrically accentuated by motifs of red ribboning and yellow animal-like heads (fig. 2). This rectangle is contoured by a rhythmically modular and colorful frame of interlace and bird-like figurations (2.2). The focal Latin cross, meanwhile, consists of six square forms (2.3), all joined by thinner rectangular tunnels (2.4). Each of these six forms possesses a green square in its middle (5), with each green square further cut into with a white square at its center (2.6). Moreover, the entire main cruciform — consisting of six square focal points connected by thin rectangular tunnels — is interspersed with ever-multiplying, diamond-rotated small squares of bright pink (2.7), brownish orange (2.8), and golden yellow (2.9). These little squares, given their gradated technique of color application, form outlines of larger diamond-rotated squares that frame the six white-in-green squares (2.10). On both its sides, the cross’s dimensions are mirrored by similar, geometrically simple yet vibrantly polychromatic shapes with diagonally composed squares (2.11). Lastly, the entire composition is immersed within a background of webbed interlace, curvilinear and fluid, yet modulated into rigid squares via the conscientious application of yellow and red hues (2.12).

In “Pattern, Process, and the Creation of Meaning in the Lindisfarne Gospels” Benjamin Tilghman suggests that this intricate composition “emerged” out of the “process” of its design, rather than being “superimposed” upon the page from its inception.⁵ Each previous form becomes the basis for the ‘process’ of determining the mode of ‘emergence’ of a new one. It is thanks to this process of production that the pages succeed so meticulously at their layered geometric mirroring, polychromatic harmony, and overall atmosphere of cohesive structural intertwinement and completeness. 

The numerological teleology of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages — their divinely purposed mathematical system — finds its best embodiment within the omnipresent motif of the cross. As Michelle Brown notes in “Reading the Lindisfarne Gospels: Text, Image, and Context,”the status of the cross in the Medieval Christian world was that of a “universal trope of the ordered cosmos.”⁶ With its four focal points, the cross gained all the theological connotations of the number four: “four cardinal points, four winds, four seasons, four elements and four rivers of paradise.” In the words of fifth-century bishop and poet Paulinus of Nola, quoted by Brown, the four arms of the cross “divid[ed] the world into four regions to draw the peoples of every land into life.”⁷

The alternative modes of reference to the carpet pages as “multiple-cross pages” and “cross-carpet pages” by medievalists such as Robert Stevenson and Jacques Guilmain make evident the significance of the cross-motif for medieval Christians.⁸ Stevenson even identifies the fundamental “formula that four symmetrical back-to-back curves form a (negative) cross,” perfectly exemplified by the folio 2v design.⁹ To name only a few examples, the little squares of yellow and orange trace Latin crosses throughout the main cruciform (fig. 3). Moreover, from the thin and dark gaps between those colorful little squares, the beholder can decipher rotated Greek crosses (3.2). Equally thin and dark gaps between the stepped modules of the quadrilateral forms on the sides of the main Latin cross formulate a myriad of Latin and Greek crosses as well (3.3). Rotated Greek crosses also emerge between the stepped modules (3.4).

This endless production and reproduction of pattern induces a compressing effect; the frame binding the design persistently echoes its forms and hues, self-introspectively leading into the main composition. This geometric-zoomorphic crowdedness generates anxiety through its unrelenting density and delimitation from the blank outsides of the page, an anxiety against lacking ornament and  even the slightest potential absence of God-ordained mathematical beauty. To echo Jacques Guilmain’s vocabulary in “The Geometry of the Cross-Carpet Pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels” (1987), the carpet page seems “restrained,” as if within an “enclosure.”¹⁰ Nonetheless, its geometric creativity, its squashed yet expressive animal physiognomies, and its energetic modular and interlacing polychrome cannot but exude a sense of “playfulness, even of whimsicality.”¹¹ The page offers a self-contained, yet all-encompassing, aesthetic microcosm of divine beauty, wealth, and perfection, of natural and mathematical wonder, of impervious integrity and ontological satisfaction. This impression of completeness amplifies in the context of the other four pages, all of which illustrate a comprehensive variety of cross-forms (not only Latin and Greek, but Celtic and Coptic) and new, equally brilliant, pigments. Therefore, a carpet page such as the Lindisfarne Gospels’ folio 2v illuminates the infinite marvels of God’s Genesis, with its author embodying  an experience proximal to divine creation itself.

The Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages are thus meant to embody the divine attributes of God-like perfection, mathematical beauty, and self-sustaining completeness. However, why then are they also so conspicuously marked by hints of unfinishedness, exposed process, optical illusion, and even imprecision or error? Why is the realization of God’s design so consistently undermined by the signs of a fallible, mortal, human artist?

After all, the upper-right corner of folio 2v lacks pigmentation by not one but two colors: red and black (fig. 4.1). Moreover, the recto of its leaf reveals “visible imprints of regularly spaced prick marks” (fig. 5), imprints from which the skeleton of each design is to this day still “discernible,” as Inga Christine Swenson notes in “The Symmetry Potentials of the Ornamental Pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.”¹² Additionally, Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s measurements reveal that the carpet-pattern of folio 2v is three millimeters shorter on the left side (233 millimeters) than on the right side (236 millimeters).¹³ Furthermore, in imposing “disproportionate spatial areas,” the Latin cross removes the possibility of a horizontal axis of symmetry (4.2). Despite the persistent geometric rhythms of the composition, folio 2v fails to be perfectly symmetrical. Even the zoomorphic interlace continues in one direction all around the frame — in other words, it is not vertically or horizontally mirrored (4.3). Significantly, the birds’ heads are not flipped along the lower horizontal stretch of the frame either, which prevents a sense of naturalistic directional continuity throughout the four sides (4.4). As Swenson remarks, the creatures do not even “correspond exactly” to each other (4.5); beyond the diversity of color or wing-pattern, their beaks and legs all possess a quiet variety that “relieve[s] the preconceived, static framework.”¹⁴ Thus, though the initial impression of the carpet page is one of rational perfection and complex order, unique gestures and dynamic interpretations riddle its material state and design process.

It feels highly improbable that Eadfrith ran out of two whole pigments in the exact same part of the very first ornamental page of the manuscript, and that he would have forgotten entirely to resupply and correct this omission. Additionally, he could have avoided leaving pricking marks by using a “light hand,” employing the line-dot system,¹⁵ or simply painting over them, all of which are techniques confidently explored by the artist throughout the manuscript, or even in different areas of this exact page.¹⁶ Nor is it likely that Eadfrith would have been so ‘consistently inconsistent’ with his geometric-zoomorphic interlace or so thoughtless about measuring his dimensions; or, alternatively, that the vellum shrunk by three millimeters along the vertical axis only, especially since the same ‘mistake’ occurs along the horizontal axis of folio 138v, only there the deviation results in a difference of not three, but ten millimeters.¹⁷ 

All these errors, oversights, and inconsistencies are highly improbable, and they are even more improbable to have been produced all together indeliberately. In fact, they are unlikely to have occurred at all, given that “the carpet pages all appear on the verso of their respective folios,” so that the beholder witnesses Eadfrith’s “guidelines, pinpricks, and preliminary sketches before seeing the page in all its finished glory.”¹⁸ It feels almost impossible that the author would have allowed for all these aesthetic ‘failures’ to be the first impression of his work, or for this persistently disruptive rhythm to echo throughout his divinely instituted design. All this would be completely uncharacteristic of such a detail-oriented and pious artist. Instead, these signs seem to embody a subversive “rationale of their own” that “subtly” but consciously “negate[s] the logic of the substructure.”¹⁹ Taken together, these elements of visual imperfection start to emerge as a deliberate part of the pages’ visual vocabulary.

But why? Why would Eadfrith formulate this paradoxical juxtaposition of divine geometric complexity and mundane human fallibility? It seems self-contradictory to work so hard for the final product, an aesthetic embodiment of God’s Will and Word, and yet so relentlessly expose the material, contingent, imperfect process behind it that is the bodily-sensory experience of Eadfrith’s techniques of production.

Far from undermining the spiritual significance or the creative processes of signification of the carpet pages, this aesthetic paradox is key to their role as “apotropaic devices, as aids to meditation, as visualizations of the beauty and complexity of scripture.”²⁰ It allows Eadfrith to invite the beholder into retracing, and thus experiencing, the bodily-sensory aspects of his production process. A process that, after all, enabled him to interact with the divine. That is because, as Tilghman posits, geometric “procedures” possess the capacity to “induce ‘flow’ states in their practitioners.”²¹ Given the organically deterministic, but also rigidly mechanical, nature of his compositional method, the author could be interpreted as having entered a particular meditative state of mind and body. This state is defined by great concentration on a dissociation-inducing rhythm of creativity — an ‘out-of-body’ experience focusing  on the visual (apprehension and composition of the design) and the tactile (interaction with the surface, the pigments, or the tools). In deriving the mathematical patterning of the carpet pages through this attentive bodily-sensory displacement, Eadfrith projects the source of his artistic practice onto numerology, geometry, and arithmetic — the God-ordained systems of creation.

In entering this mathematically-induced state of Christian grace, Eadfrith surrendered his authorship to the guidance of divine agency. He became more of a (dis)embodied “witness” to the creation of the carpet pages rather than their “generative force.”²² Paradoxically, by exploring the aesthetics of error alongside the visual miracle of his compositions and reminding his beholder of the material presence and sensory experiences of his own body within this sanctified process, he allows them to become a witness too. The meaning and power of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages belong to both their final appearance and to their convoluted process.

To See Yet Not to Perceive, to Touch Yet Not to Grasp

Through his artistic choices and gestures, Eadfrith welcomes the contemplation of his creative process and thus facilitates an experience of divinity for the beholders of his work. This conclusion reveals not only the possibility, but the necessity of the beholder for the affect of the aesthetics of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages. After all, their meaning relies on meaningfully recognizing the distinctly human marks of unfinishedness or error. For instance, their faulty symmetries are adaptively unnoticeable to the human perceptual apparatus, yet eagerly discoverable by human curiosity and keenness on detailed analysis. Stevenson’s negatively produced crosses, detectable only relationally, contingent, non-self-sufficient (to incorporate Swenson’s term, ‘spectral’),²³ gain discernable form and symbolic value only because of the geometric-theological interpretative framework of the beholder’s subjectivity. Meanwhile, the variety of particularities and detail of each zoomorphic form has been manipulated seemingly just for the aesthetic enjoyment of sensitive admirers of ornamental art. The presence of the human body can be said to be inscribed into the meaning of these pages.

Nonetheless, the carpet pages also push the interpretative capacities of the perceptual apparatus in ambivalent, if not self-contradictory, directions. Their masterful stimulation of the human body through their aesthetics does not restrict itself to the sense of sight – the realm of visual flatness, conceptual marvels of divine numerology and geometry, or sophisticated pure ornament elaborated upon above. It extends onto the tangible, material, and representational practicalities of the sense of touch. As such, the author paradoxically locates the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels within both abstract and mimetic artistic practice.

For instance, Eadfrith’s rich allocations of colorful pigments onto folio 2v, far from simply visually appealing, indicate “divisions of areas” that place different motifs on “different scales.”²⁴ Of course, the design lacks any explicit spatial differentiators (shadow-imitative gradients of hue, linear or aerial perspective, overlapping that extends beyond minor forms like the weaving-through of areas of interlace, etc.). Nonetheless, folio 2v positions the square-saturated cruciform and its flanking stepped modules before the field of red-yellow interlace, mostly thanks to the subtle decrease in luminosity of this ‘background.’ Speaking in more synoptic terms, the carpet pages are also placed at the start of each piece of Scripture — they “stand at the entrance to the ‘holy ground’ of sacred text”²⁵ to “fence off and delimit the entry” to the world of the Gospels.²⁶ Consequently, they provide the manuscript with a sense of architectural compartmentalization and three-dimensionality, especially in the context of the sheer size and thickness — the spatial gravitas — of the physical codex. Both visual text and context of the carpet page thus grant it a degree of figurative spatial construction that goes directly against their strictly decorative status. The folios establish an immersive mimetic room for the body and the senses of the beholder.

Beyond this more general presence in ‘real time and space,’ the design of these carpet pages also inevitably alludes to carpets: expensive but widespread medieval commodities. Their very name tethers them to the domestic concreteness of the physical world, imbuing their aesthetics with particular representative connotations: ground-based spatial presence, implicit larger scale, potential for comfortable or coarse texture. Alternatively, as Brown suggests, they may have also been intended to imitate “Eastern prayer mat[s]” (fig. 6).²⁷ This compliments their aesthetic allusion to economic wealth with a dimension of spiritual richness. Consequently, when Chiara Valle in “Woven Words in the Lindisfarne Gospels” describes the carpet pages as “luxurious textiles that unveil the Gospels and function as apotropaic devices,”²⁸ her words can be taken not only metaphorically, but materially and literally too.

The association of the representativeness of these carpet pages with the ground and Earth can be further derived from their darkly contoured geometric modularity, one resemblant of Roman mosaic pavements.²⁹ This visual connection elaborates on the role of the pages as constant and reliable facilitators of the beholder’s encounter with Scripture, for their aesthetics ‘pave the way’ towards God’s truth. Moreover, Stevenson links the ever-multiplicative character of crosses across different planes of the carpet pages’ design to the landscape of omnipresent Christian grave slabs on medieval cemeteries. He relates this multiple-cross landscape not only to the embodied presence within religious spaces of “church floors, walls, and ceilings,”³⁰ but to the very body of a Christian believer, a body which inscribes upon itself the sign of the cross at every possible opportunity of grace or piety.³¹ All these representational connotations intertwine the Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages with guidance into and facilitation of tactile comfort, spiritual improvement, as well as theological and eschatological community and ritual.

However, the pages’ representational allusions are not restricted to textures and functions of animal-derived tapestries or meticulous stone tesserae. The omnipresence interlace, for example, echoes the ornaments found upon medieval vessels or swords (fig. 7) — a forging technique that simultaneously decorated and strengthened the metal. The metal-like tactility of the carpet pages imbues Eadfrith with the aesthetic skill of a blacksmith and the beholder with their protective power. Furthermore, the vibrant tiny squares of folio 2v and the circles on top of the forms flanking the frame of folio 210v resemble the shapes of gemstones. Meanwhile, for the accentuation of folio 138v, Eadfrith even moves away from his regular pigments into using gold leaf,³² evoking the presence of a marvelous “jeweled” cross.³³ Furthermore, his style of color application throughout all the pages consists of vibrant polychrome inserted into dark contours and constant intertwinements of forms that formulate a delicate sense of porous luminosity. These aesthetic gestures are reminiscent of the dark mullions and light effects of medieval glass-stained windows, a craft traceable on the British Isles all the way to the seventh century.³⁴

Nonetheless, it feels paradoxical for a design to evoke both the abstract and the figurative. Especially since, even only within the realm of the figurative, it represents both Earth-connoted materials of fabric or stone and Heaven-connoted materials of jewels, gold, or glass i.e. “the materials that the New Testament selected for the Heavenly Jerusalem.”³⁵ Moreover, only within one category of imitated material, the Lindisfarne Gospels evoke the aesthetics of interlaced metal inside its manuscript while the manuscript itself is bound outside with a metal cover (fig. 8).³⁶ Alternatively, it feels paradoxical to evoke the aesthetics of jewels within the design of the carpet pages since the book already possesses an external bejeweled binding originally produced by Billfrith the Anchorite.

All these complications render highly ambivalent, if not self-contradictory, the aesthetic status of the carpet pages. Alongside the multi-layered intellectual and artistic pleasure they provide for the beholder, the multiplicity of their visuo-tactile stimulation leads to confounding impressions of fascination, mystery, ambiguity, obscurity, and bewilderment, to an insatiable desire to see and feel, interpret and perceive, to grasp and understand. Within this paradox, however, rests their fundamental significance. All these overwhelming emotional embodiments do not need to be interpreted as impeding medieval Christian rhetoric, but rather as “rhetorical figures” themselves, ones that enabled the doctrine to illuminate “words contained in Scripture when the truth of their content [was] difficult to access.”³⁷ The Lindisfarne Gospels provide the fragments of a mystifying window at a God-ordained world, a world far more beautiful, perfect, self-sufficient, and intertwined than that of the beholder. They build up all these signs of human presence, these gestures towards particular human audiences and allusions to the spatial and tangible materialities of the physical world, all to ultimately provoke the beholder into the endless, insatiable curiosity about their comprehension. The carpet pages’ many paradoxes thus dynamically facilitate the beholder’s bodily-sensory encounter with the divine, while simultaneously making them desire more. This can be only called a most successful mode of aesthetic translation of the essence of Christian Scripture, a most marvelous illustration and illumination of the wonders of God’s Word.

The Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet pages exploit to the fullest the aesthetic and theological capacities of paradox. Eadfrith balances masterfully the necessary elegance of divine numerology with his own fallible bodily presence, inspiring human curiosity in bilateral movements: tracing meticulously the impervious perfections of God’s natural-mathematical Genesis as well as leading the beholder into more accessible modes of divine grace and meditative ‘flow.’ Moreover, he excites with the conceptual pleasures of pure ornament alongside the decipherable materialities of tactile mimesis, packing into the already dense composition of geometry, zoomorphism, and interlace a myriad of stimulating allusions to the outside world (and, in fact, to the externally encompassing codex). His achievement is nothing short of remarkable.

In size, complexity, text, and composition, the manuscript provides the beholder with a transcendental experience of beauty. This experience emerges both from the context of its sheer craftsmanship and from its extra-textual spiritual significance. The scholarship of Swenson, Guilmain, Stevenson, Stevick, Valle, Backhouse, Brown, and Tilghman, spans consistently for over five decades since Bruce-Mitford’s initial analysis of the manuscript. This proves how fascinating, overwhelming, and attention-worthy the Lindisfarne Gospels continue to be, just how much they can reveal to us of the medieval arts, minds, and bodies.

Endnotes

1. Janet Backhouse, “Lindisfarne Gospels.” Grove Art Online (2003): para. 9, doi.org/10.1093/9781884446054. ↩︎
2. Jacques Guilmain, “The Geometry of the Cross-Carpet Pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels.” Speculum 62, no. 1 (1987): 24, www.jstor.org/stable/2852565. ↩︎
3. Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process, and the Creation of Meaning in the Lindisfarne Gospels.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 24, no. 1 (2017): 14, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/693796. ↩︎
4. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 14. ↩︎
5. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process” 10. ↩︎
6. Michelle P. Brown and Richard Gameson, eds. “Reading the Lindisfarne Gospels: Text, Image, Context.” The Lindisfarne Gospels (2017): 85. www.academia.edu/Reading_the_Lindisfarne. ↩︎
7. Brown and Gameson, “Text, Image, Context,” 85. ↩︎
8. Guilmain, “Cross-Carpet Pages.” ↩︎
9. Robert B. K. Stevenson, “Aspects of Ambiguity in Crosses and Interlace (The Oliver Davies Lecture for 1981).” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 44/45 (1981): 1. www.jstor.org/stable/20567862.  ↩︎
10. Guilmain, “Cross-Carpet Pages,” 33. ↩︎
11. Stevenson, “Aspects of Ambiguity,” 20. ↩︎
12. Inga Christine Swenson, “The Symmetry Potentials of the Ornamental Pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.” Gesta 17, no. 1, (1978): 9. doi.org/10.2307/766708.   ↩︎
13. Jacques Guilmain, “The Composition of the First Cross Page of the Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘Square Schematism’ and the Hiberno-Saxon Aesthetic.” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 4 (1985): 535. doi.org/10.2307/3050843. ↩︎
14. Swenson, “Symmetry Potentials,” 12-15. ↩︎
15. Swenson, “Symmetry Potentials,” 10. ↩︎
16. Guilmain, “Cross-Carpet Pages,” 31. ↩︎
17. Robert D. Stevick, “The Design of Lindisfarne Gospels Folio 138v.” Gesta 22, no. 1 (1983): 3–12. doi.org/10.2307/766948.  ↩︎
18. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 26. ↩︎
19. Swenson, “Symmetry Potentials,” 15. ↩︎
20. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 8. ↩︎
21. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 19. ↩︎
22. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 20-23. ↩︎
23. Swenson, “Symmetry Potentials,” 15. ↩︎
24. Swenson, “Symmetry Potentials,” 11. ↩︎
25. Brown and Gameson, “Text, Image, Context,” 86. ↩︎
26. Guilmain, ‘Cross-Carpet Pages,” 24. ↩︎
27. Brown and Gameson, “Text, Image, Context,” 86. ↩︎
28. Chiara Valle, “Woven Words in the Lindisfarne Gospels.” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2015), 70. jhir.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/39564. ↩︎
29. Guilmain, “First Cross Page,” 544. ↩︎
30. Stevenson, “Aspects of Ambiguity,” 7. ↩︎
31. Stevenson, “Aspects of Ambiguity,” 4. ↩︎
32. Valle, “Woven Words,” 89. ↩︎
33. Valle, “Woven Words,” 76. ↩︎
34. Valle, “Woven Words,” 72. ↩︎
35. Valle, “Woven Words,” 83. ↩︎
36. Tilghman, “Pattern, Process,” 17. ↩︎
37. Valle, “Woven Words,” 104. ↩︎

About the Author

Paulina Gąsiorowska is a sophomore at Brown University studying History of Art and Comparative Literature. Ever since walking into her first Gothic church (of which there are plenty in her home country of Poland), she has been fascinated by the ways Medieval art and culture blur the boundaries between light and dark, text and image, dirt and pigment, routine and miracle. In her free time, she dreams of starring in a miracle play and really misses her cats.