Winchester Bible
The Winchester Bible is in the Winchester Cathedral in England and at one time there was a description of the Bible and images of selected pages on the Cathedral’s website. I can no longer find them.
In 2014 the Cathedral commissioned a Bible Conservation Project that would unbind, conserve, digitize, and then rebind each of the four volumes of the Winchester Bible so that it could be displayed at the Cathedral. Although the Bible was digitized as part of the Project, the results can be seen only at the Cathedral. As far as I can tell they are not online. A description of the project is on the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust website and a lengthy and detailed report by Christopher Clarkson, a pre-eminent book conservator who supervised the work until his death in 2017, is here. In 2014 pages from two volumes of the Winchester Bible were loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for a three-month exhibition. The Met’s website contains an exhibit overview, a 90-minute lecture about the Bible, and a series of articles (click on Winchester Bible Exhibition Blog at left). One blog shows the first page of Genesis, which begins, “In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”). The capital letter “I” contains seven pictures: the creation of Eve out of the side of Adam, a dove returning to Noah who is waiting in the ark, Abraham getting ready to sacrifice Isaac, God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses, Samuel anointing David as king, the Nativity, and the Last Judgment. |