The Book of Kells is the most spectacular of a group of manuscripts created in Ireland and northern Britain between the seventh and tenth centuries, a period when Irish monasticism was in the vanguard of Christian culture. Its earliest history is still a matter for conjecture but it was in the keeping of the monastery of Kells, Co. Meath, for most of the Middle Ages - hence its name - and has been in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, since the mid-seventeenth century. It is a masterpiece of medieval art - a brilliantly illuminated copy of the four Gospels with full-page illustrations of Christ, the Virgin and the Evangelists and a wealth of smaller decorative painting that seems to have little to do with the sacred text. The strange, half-Surrealist imagination displayed in the pages, the impeccable technique and the very fine state of preservation make it an object of endless fascination. This edition includes the most important of the large illustrations plus a series of enlargements showing the almost unbelievable minuteness of the detail - arabesques, interlaced patterns, weird and witty monsters and grotesqueries - a combination of high seriousness and bizarre humour that is as astonishing now as when the Book was written. Accompanying the illustrations is Peter Brown"s scholarly analysis of these exuberant inventions, the artists, the test and the writing, and a full account of the historical background to the miraculous world of the Book of Kells.