The significance of the Bible in the life, thought and culture of the early Middle Ages can hardly be overstated. Here eleven linked studies, embracing palaeography, history, art history, theology and textual scholarship, examine and interpret the evidence of Bible manuscripts (including gospel books and Psalters) in their cultural context from late antiquity to the thirteenth century.

Subjects include the earliest Bible manuscripts, the Gospels in a missionary context, the scriptorium of Tours, the development of the early glossed Psalter, the Old Testament in tenth-and eleventh-century England, the Italian Giant Bibles, the origins of the Paris Bible, the illustration of the early Gothic Psalter and the planning and production of the Hamburg Bible.

Together these essays provide a broad-ranging, authoritative treatment of themes which are of central importance for the history and culture of the times.