Lindisfarne Gospels and the Qur’an of Sultan Baybar II

Art history
Paper instructions:

Visit the British Library’s online Turning the Pages exhibit (linked on Moodle) and spend time paging through the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Qur’an of Sultan Baybar II. Both manuscripts are spectacular examples of book art. The Lindisfarne Gospel is from the Hiberno-Saxon tradition, and the Qur’an of Sultan Baybar II is a work of Mamluk art. As you look through the manuscripts, reflect on how you experience them as books, and if/how this differs from your experience of paging through a modern book. Be sure to use the tools in the Turning the Pages application, in particular the magnification and text features. Note that the entirety of the books are not shown €“ the Lindisfarne Gospels in particular omits numerous text pages.

Your paper should provide an analysis of one or both manuscripts as books. You might decide to select a few pages from one book and provide a close analysis of those pages, or create a comparison of the two books based on close analysis of several pages. You may instead decide to provide a holistic assessment of one or both books supported by reference to specific pages and/or passages. Questions to consider include the overall conception, flow and design of each book, issues of page layout, the treatment of words and decorative details, and the relationship of text to image. If you decide to discuss both manuscripts, your paper should also compare each culture’s approach to religious books and book arts as seen in the two manuscripts.

Your analysis should be structured as a paper and contain an introduction with a thesis statement in the form of an argument, a conclusion and a detailed analysis in the body of the text. Your paper should not read like a list of isolated qualities or observations, but should instead integrate each observation into a larger whole guided by your interpretation of the work(s).

You may want to do some outside research for this paper, although this is not required. I have put links to two books on Moodle to help get you started €“ one on the Lindisfarne Gospels, and a chapter on Mamluk art from a book on Islamic art. If you use outside sources they must be properly cited. You are expected to be aware of what constitutes plagiarism and to avoid it.