lindisfarne gosp[els
...to question its relevance and educational capacity, as it seems more geared toward someone who already possesses an advanced grasp of the topics discussed within. For example, would the average person need to know exactly how many calves were used to make the Lindesfarne Gospels? Not really, but I now do. 130. These little ‘fun facts’ are interspersed throughout the film and prove more distracting than informative or interesting. The portion of the film dedicated to St. Cuthbert isolated on his island to the point where the birds who visited the island became his only friends had this same tint of excessive mundane information. Several minutes were devoted to a discussion of how differently the birds were stylized in the various sections of the gospels. I felt that all of this banal background distracted from the significance of the works of St. Cuthbert. The background the film gave on St. Cuthbert was not entirely superfluous. The biographical information about the saint’s life was extremely helpful in trying to understand more about the man and his relationship with the art. Cuthbert left the church to “stay in solitude for no short space of time and to be silent and apart from the conversation of mankind for the sake of the sweetness of meditating on God” writes Bede in The Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert. Cuthbert is clearly an idealized man of God from both Bede’s writing and what the narrator in the film called The Lindesfarne Gospels; a lab...