She argued that the use of Greek and Hebrew, as well as marginal reference annotations, reflect Bede’s interests and practices: “We also know from his own admission that he was ‘author, notary and scribe’ and would have mastered the gamut of the Insular system of scripts, as this hand had. So it’s got these mark-ups that he’s only inventing around this period.” The little zigzag lines that look like lightning flashes he invented like a yellow magic marker to indicate when he was quoting a passage – a passage of the Old Testament period in the New Testament, for example. So we’ve got the marginalia and the way in which he marks up. Not that many people did know Greek at that time. Noting the sophistication of an exceptional scholar rather than a mere scribe, she singled out complex Greek letter-forms in the margins and a distinctive “lightning flash” that Bede pioneered to highlight quotations. In the preface to the Book of Kings in the Codex Amiatinus – a Bible that was taken to Rome from Jarrow in 715 and is now in a Florentine archive – she found parallels between grammar and linguistics within annotated passages and Bede’s published writings. Michelle Brown, the British Library’s former curator of illuminated manuscripts, told the Observer that extensive evidence within two manuscripts makes a compelling and exciting case for linking them to the eighth-century monk and scholar of the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow near Newcastle. A stained glass window depicting the Venerable Bede at St Nicholas church in Blakeney, Norfolk.
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