The sophisticated book decoration with color and ornament visible in the St. Petersburg Gregory manuscript accords well with the changes in reading and educational practices discussed in the preceding chapters, with the conception of composition in prose and verse demonstrably current in the monasteries in Francia and to some extent in Italy, especially those associated with the mission of Columbanus, the world in which the new art of manuscript illumination emerges in the later seventh century. However, even if one accepts that the changes in reading practice are a helpful or even necessary means of understanding the manuscript’s novel decoration, they are certainly not a sufficient means of understanding it. The St. Petersburg Gregory manuscript is a visual work, not a disembodied text. Its decoration may be analogous to verbal ornament and syntax, as I have suggested, but it is built around entirely different elements, forms rather than sounds. Those forms have their own history, and so does the context in which they appear in the St. Petersburg Gregory, namely the parchment codex.