In the case of Anglo-Saxon England the authors have fragments of three sacramentaries that provide information on Anglo-Saxon prayer. The chief evidence comes from some thirty Anglo-Saxon gospel books, which sometimes reveal which gospel passages were chosen to be read on particular days. Among these, six manuscripts have marginal notes indicating such uses: the Lindisfarne Gospels; London, BL, Royal I B vii; Durham, Cathedral Library, A II 16 and A II 17; and two sixth-century Italian gospel books. From these six manuscripts scholars have tried to reconstruct the liturgical system of gospel lections in use in Anglo-Saxon England before 800. This chapter is a discussion of one of these witnesses. Durham, A II 16 is a substantial part of a large and impressive gospel book. The remarkable feature of Durham, A II 16 is that the script in which the Synoptic Gospels were written changes dramatically.

Paris, BNF Latin 4629, is a manuscript containing Frankish law-codes, capitularies of Charlemagne and formulae, most probably copied in Bourges at the start of the ninth century. It has been linked with the court of Charlemagne by Donald Bullough. Amid the legal texts, it contains a dialogue that offers insights into some of the questions Charlemagne's subjects sought to answer. By offering a transcription and a translation, this chapter first provides a teaching source for those who want to understand Frankish thoughts, especially about religion and ethics, and then explores where these questions and answers may have come from, and why they might have been copied here. That exploration is, of course, an exercise in what some call historical imagination and others call guesswork. As such, it stands as a tribute to the scholar who has given the author the strongest support for guessing how Carolingians thought and acted.

Janet nelson was born in 1942 and grew up in Blackpool, Lancashire. After graduation she proceeded directly to postgraduate research under Professor Walter Ullmann, completing a PhD in 1967. Her thesis title was 'Rituals of Royal Inauguration in Early Medieval Europe. The research gave her an understanding of the political resonance of the liturgy in the early Middle Ages and a thorough grounding in that intellectually rigorous scholarship which is the hallmark of her work. Janet Nelson's concern with how ideology, ritual and political thought might be combined in practical action, and with how individuals made choices according to needs and opportunities, led her to work on the reign of Charles the Bald, a figure rather in need of historical rehabilitation. The result was a model of political history that set the pace for a series of studies that rethought the history of the later Carolingians.

In the art of late Antiquity and the early medieval period, the figure of Christ often appears in the form of ‘God with the book’ (Fig. 1). The literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was one of the first to emphasize the particularity of this pictorial formula, identifying the significant difference between it and depictions of divinities from pagan Antiquity. Given the central role of Christ’s image in the visual culture of pre-modern Christianity, and in particular in Christian debates about the status of religious images, this observation is crucial. Yet somewhat surprisingly, the book has never played a major role in art-historical discussion of the depiction of Christ. The focus has been on the depiction of Christ in terms of his bodily appearance, with the result that the intimate symbiosis between Christ and the book has been left out of the equation. Since Christ himself was conceived as incarnate Logos or verbum, the book’s relation to him is neither metonymical nor metaphorical but ‘mediological’: body and book were both media of the Christian God. To put it more pointedly, it could be said that in such images, the changing countenance of the book formed the counterpart to the changing countenance of Christ’s body.

Initially still in scroll format, the book soon assumed codex form, affording new possibilities to distinguish between the closed and open book, between exterior and interior. Where an open book was shown, its interior provided a space in which to incorporate text. The writing allowed the book to speak and, through the book, gave a voice to Christ. In contrast, rather different features appear as hallmarks of the closed book’s exterior. Instead of scripture, geometric patterns predominate: the quincunx, the St Andrew’s cross and the orthogonal cross. The graphic schemata on the closed book are deployed as the Other of writing, in precisely the sense suggested by the conception of ‘graphicacy’ in this volume. This raises two questions: how is this design of the exterior of the codex, its cover, related to the idea of Christ as being ‘God with the book’?; and how do the book covers in such depictions relate to the actual bindings of medieval books? I would like to address these two questions by examining the genre of liturgical books with treasure bindings.