Suites of illumination introducing the gospels form a distinctive part of the Insular contribution to the medieval book (Fig. 1). Such decoration helped the reader to navigate the text visually, symbolically and cognitively, and might assist in penetrating its deeper meaning and interpretation. These images, in which letters, ornament and illustration converge, are complex vehicles of communication. They could serve as iconic places of assembly for ‘communities of reading’, whose members accessed and were affected by them in different ways. In this chapter I shall examine some such images (including examples from the Lindisfarne Gospels, the St Chad Gospels and the Book of Cerne, the Book of Kells and manuscripts from Armagh), which together demonstrate varied functions and contexts of reception – liturgical, cultic, theological, legal, didactic and devotional. I shall also explore some of the strategies of reading that may be deployed in comprehending and assessing them.

The Celtic and Germanic converts of early medieval northern Europe possessed long traditions, stretching into prehistory, for signalling power, status, descent and belief through ornament, sign and symbol. Among the most developed and enigmatic of these communication systems were the Pictish symbols – a series of stylized glyphs based largely upon animal and artefact forms which reflect interaction between the indigenous prehistoric populace of much of what is now Scotland and the antique world. These may date from as early as the late Roman period until after Alba assumed its status as a unified kingdom, incorporating the Irish (Scotti) settlers, in the mid-ninth century. Following the reform of the Pictish Church, initiated by King Nechtan’s rapprochement with Northumbria at the beginning of the eighth century, these symbols, which, in the absence of a Pictish Rosetta stone, have yet to be convincingly deciphered, were combined with the more familiar repertoire of biblical and ruler imagery and of Insular ornament and Christian symbols, seen on complex monuments such as the Aberlemno Churchyard Cross-Slab (Forfarshire).

Thus, the visual semiotics of a strategically sited monument (perhaps designed, in the eighth century, to commemorate the Pictish victory over Northumbria at the Battle of Nechtanesmere in 685) proclaim a history of complex internecine relations.