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News & Events>News
Archive>Liturgical Press announces two booksLiturgical Press
announces two books based on
The Saint John’s Bible - the first handwritten Bible in 500 years -
on display at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts April 10 - July 3, 2005
COLLEGEVILLE, MINNESOTA—The Saint John’s Bible is a monumental
achievement. As a major artistic, cultural and spiritual endeavor, it is the
first handwritten, illuminated Bible commissioned since the printing press
was invented five centuries ago. The launch of a national museum tour of the
one-of-a-kind The Saint John’s Bible begins with a special exhibition
April 10, 2005 at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
To coincide with the launch of the national museum tour, Liturgical
Press, a Catholic publishing house and apostolate of Saint John’s Abbey in
Collegeville, Minnesota is pleased to announce the distribution of two new
titles based of The Saint John’s Bible including Gospels and Acts,
the first in a seven-volume series of full-color trade reproductions. The
volumes in the series mirror the original hand-illuminated manuscripts of
The Saint John’s Bible. A second book, Illuminating the Word:
The Making of The Saint John’s Bible chronicles the process of
creating this phenomenal manuscript. High quality giclée prints of the pages
and illuminations of The Saint John’s Bible are also available.
These museum quality prints represent the artistic integrity of the original
illuminations.
“In the days before printed books, people must have thought and felt
differently about words on the page: words were written with discipline,
slowly and thoughtfully. It was a kind of outward expression of that
ruminating over the words of the Bible which shaped the inner world of
reflective believers, especially monks. This project not only revives the
ancient tradition of the church sponsoring creative arts; it also offers an
insight into that lost skill of patient and prayerful reading. We tend to
read greedily and hastily, as we do so many other things; this beautiful
text shows us a better way,” says The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop
of Canterbury.
An internationally respected calligrapher, Donald Jackson is the artistic
director and illuminator of The Saint John’s Bible. He is a Senior
Scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords
in the United Kingdom, a position in which he is responsible for the
creation of official state documents. His 30-year retrospective exhibition,
Painting With Words, premiered at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in
Minneapolis, Minnesota in August, 1988 and traveled to 13 museums and
galleries. Donald Jackson works with a team of theologians and artists from
Saint John’s University and Abbey on The Saint John’s Bible. From his
scriptorium in Wales, he oversees scribes, artists, and craftsmen who work
with him on the handwriting and illumination of the seven-volume, 1,150-page
Bible.
Gospels and Acts is published in hardcover, 136 pages, 9 3/4 x 15,
$64.95, Illuminating the Word: The Making of The Saint John’s Bible
is published in hardcover, 240 pages, 9 5/8 x 11 3/8, $39.95. Both titles
available in religious and trade bookstores in April 2005, or directly from
Liturgical Press. Call: 1-800-858-5450; fax: 1-800-445-5899; or e-mail:
sales@litpress.org. A complete catalog is also available online:
www.litpress.org.
The Saint John’s Bible
Saint John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery, and Saint John’s University,
founded by the Abbey in 1857, commissioned one of the world’s foremost
calligraphers, Donald Jackson, in 1998 to carry out the creation of The
Saint John’s Bible, a major artistic, cultural, and spiritual endeavor. Mr.
Jackson, a Senior Scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at
the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, has been working with a team of
artists and theologians from Saint John’s Abbey and University as well as
from the Monastery of Saint Benedict and the College of Saint Benedict.
When completed in 2007, The Saint John’s Bible will be composed of seven
15 7/8” by 24 ½” volumes: Gospels and Acts, Pentateuch, Historical Books,
Prophets, Wisdom Books, Psalms, and Letters and Revelation. Each volume
will be bound separately.
The Saint John’s Bible is the first handwritten Bible that interprets and
illustrates Scripture from a contemporary perspective, reflecting a
multicultural world and humanity’s enormous strides in science, technology,
and space travel. An ecumenical undertaking, The Saint John’s Bible
also incorporates imagery from Eastern and Western religious traditions, as
well as influences from the Native American cultures in the Minnesota area.
It also documents Minnesota as the birthplace of The Saint John’s Bible
through illustrations of flora and fauna indigenous to the region.
“Many people have appreciated the butterflies of central Minnesota in the
margins, or the occasional building from Saint John’s that has been tucked
into an illumination, or the reference to the now-vanished World Trade
Center in New York,” said Fr. Hollas. “Many agree it is important to bring
our own experience of the world to the Bible.”
The selection and interpretation of Bible passages for illumination was
decided under the leadership and guidance of the Committee on Illumination
and Text (CIT), a team of artists and theologians from Saint John’s, with
input from other religious leaders, including men and women from a diverse
range of religious traditions.
“I hope some of the emotion that we have collectively managed to put into
the Bible will touch the hearts and emotions of those people who look at
what we put onto the pages,” said Donald Jackson, calligrapher and
illuminator of The Saint John’s Bible.
Mr. Jackson creates all of the illuminations using traditional tools,
colors, inks and metals, inviting other scribes from around the world to
consult and work with him at the Scriptorium. Passages are being illuminated
with gold, silver, copper, and platinum. The Saint John’s Bible is being
written with quills on carefully selected vellum that is prepared for
writing on both sides.
A Handwritten Bible and Computer Technology
This handwritten Bible is being created using state-of-the-art technology.
One unique application is in the Book of Psalms. Mr. Jackson and his staff
elected to illuminate Psalms in a very different way—taking musical
recordings of the Psalms, including Gregorian Chants by the monks of Saint
John’s, as well as recordings from other sacred texts, and converting them
into a digital format with colorful patterns and wave formations displayed
on a computer monitor called digital voice prints. The digital voice prints
were photographed and captured by Mr. Jackson. He then created artistic
renderings of these color patterns and incorporated them into choir books
that appear at the beginning of the five books of Psalms. He also scattered
these “virtual voice prints” throughout the Book of Psalms.
“The visual interpretation of Psalms using digital technology is a
wonderful example of why The Saint John’s Bible is a Bible for our times,”
said Carol Marrin, director of The Saint John’s Bible. “As observers, we can
see the rich colors, panels and details that were literally modeled by the
hidden power of sound in Psalms captured using computer technology. This is
a very modern and innovative treatment of Psalms.”
This manuscript is the first handwritten Bible to be rendered for
planning purposes on a computer. The text, the New Revised Standard Version,
was sent to Mr. Jackson on computer disks. A font close in size to the one
Mr. Jackson has developed for The Saint John’s Bible was used to create a
digital template, enabling him to plan the specific layout of each page.
“The Saint John’s Bible is created by polarity technology,” said
Dr. Maurer. “On one hand you have Donald and the scribes working with
ancient writing instruments. At the same time they’re planning the whole
thing on a computer.”
International and National Notoriety
Since The Saint John’s Bible was announced five years ago, it has
gained national and international public interest. Newsweek magazine has
called it “America’s Book of Kells.” A BBC documentary aired for the first
time in the United States in December 2003, and has been viewed on more than
25 PBS stations nationally. BBC 4 Radio produced a 30-minute audio
documentary that aired in the United Kingdom on Good Friday of this year.
Major stories have appeared in Smithsonian, U.S. News and World Report, The
London Times, The New York Times and People Magazine, to name a few, as well
as television coverage on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, The
Today Show, PBS and the BBC.
Representatives Abbot John Klassen, Calligrapher Donald Jackson and Saint
John’s University President Br. Dietrich Reinhart from Saint John’s Abbey
and University were among thousands of religious pilgrims who attended a
papal audience in Rome on May 26, 2004. The Saint John’s delegation
presented a limited edition, full-size reproduction of Gospels and Acts,
from The Saint John’s Bible, to the Holy Father.
A Monastic Tradition
Since its formation in the sixth century, Benedictine monasticism has been
an important source for the production and the preservation of books. It was
through their painstaking efforts throughout the Middle Ages, that great
manuscripts, not only Bibles and prayer books, but also great works of
philosophy and science, were preserved for future generations.
“What is most remarkable is five hundred years after the invention of
printing, a Benedictine community is commissioning a Bible on the scale and
size that it would have been eight hundred years ago,” said Dr. Christopher
de Hamel, a manuscript historian and director of The Parker Library, Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, England. “This is an artistic project that’s
taking the scribe and his collaborators a half of dozen years or more but I
think we should look upon it as something on the scale of a huge building
project as it would have been in the Middle Ages. It’s rare now to get any
artistic endeavor that extends over a period as long as that.”
Saint John’s University is connected to this tradition through the
various book arts programs they sponsor, including the Hill Monastic
Manuscript Library (HMML), Arca Artium, and Special Collections at Saint
John’s. Saint John’s is a national and international center for the book
arts, and religious culture whose mission is to search out and preserve
manuscripts, rare books, and works of art of religious and cultural
importance and study these materials and support the creation of works of
art and scholarship related to them.
Since its founding in 1965, HMML has sent teams of researchers and
technicians to film more than 25 million pages from nearly 90,000 volumes in
libraries and archives throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Today, HMML represents one of the largest and most comprehensive archives of
medieval and Renaissance sources in the world. More than a repository of
manuscripts, HMML is one of the most highly regarded research libraries in
medieval studies in the country.
Educational Programs and Worldwide Outreach
Saint John’s University is using The Saint John’s Bible to reach out to
people in churches, parishes, schools, and universities. In addition to
touring the Bible to museums and libraries globally, Liturgical Press is
distributing seven volumes of full-color trade reproductions of the books
based on The Saint John’s Bible and a separate book focusing on the making
of the Saint John’s Bible titled Illuminating the Word. Saint John’s is
committed to finding ways to use the text and illuminations of this historic
project to explore the history of the book arts, modern art, and Scripture.
The Saint John’s Bible is being underwritten by private support.
To date, over 800 individuals, families, foundations, and corporations have
contributed over $4 million dollars to The Saint John’s Bible, including a
$500,000 grant from the Eugene U. and Mary F. Frey Family Fund at The Saint
Paul Foundation and the generous corporate leadership support of Target
Corporation.
Saint John’s
Saint John’s is home to Saint John’s Abbey and University, the School of
Theology • Seminary, and the Preparatory School. Over the years, Saint
John’s has become home to a number of other renowned institutions including:
Liturgical Press, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, the Episcopal House
of Prayer, the Institute for Ecumenical
and Cultural Research, the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian
Learning, Arca Artium, Saint John’s Pottery,
Saint John’s Arboretum, and Saint John’s Boys Choir.
Saint John’s University and the College of Saint
Benedict
Saint John’s University for men and the College of Saint Benedict for women
are partners in liberal arts education, providing students the opportunity
to benefit from the distinctions of not one, but two nationally recognized
Catholic, Benedictine, undergraduate colleges. Together, the colleges
challenge students to live balanced lives of learning, work, leadership, and
service in a changing world.
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