This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Illuminated Gospel Books gathers three Insular manuscripts, made in Ireland or Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries, carrying the four Latin gospels wrapped in decoration unlike anything produced elsewhere at the time.
The Book of Durrow is the earliest of the three, generally dated to the second half of the seventh century, opening with full carpet pages and evangelist symbol pages with no earlier parallel in Western manuscript art. Where it was made is still argued between the Irish monastery of Durrow, Iona, and a Northumbrian house, since the book itself names neither scribe nor place; local tradition later used it as a charm dipped in water for sick cattle, leaving visible water damage.
The Lindisfarne Gospels, made around the year 700, is the most fully documented of the group: a later note names the scribe, the binder, the metalworker and the man who added its Old English gloss, itself the oldest surviving translation of the gospels into English. Its pigments include lapis lazuli, obtainable in 700 only from central Asia, putting a Northumbrian island monastery at the end of a trade route spanning the known world.
The Book of Kells is the latest and most elaborate, decoration so dense that a single initial can expand to fill a page and dissolve into interlace and figures, at real cost to the accuracy of its text, which was copied carelessly in places. It was made to be displayed on an altar rather than read at a desk, and the Annals of Ulster record its theft in 1007 as the loss of the chief relic of the western world.