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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE BOOK OF PSALMS ARRIVES AT SAINT JOHN’S UNIVERSITY
The Saint John’s Bible Marks Midpoint in Project
Collegeville, Minn., April 22, 2004 — Saint John’s University announces
the arrival of the Book of Psalms marking a midpoint in the completion of
The Saint John’s Bible. The Book of Psalms, which is the third volume to
be completed by Calligrapher Donald Jackson in his scriptorium in Wales, has
been brought to the United States and Saint John’s University this month for
unveiling.
“This project is unique because of the vision that Saint John’s and
Donald Jackson and his artists have brought to it,” said Dr. Evan Maurer,
director and president of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “It’s unique in
its ecumenical view of bringing information to the illuminations to show a
universality. It brings a contemporary celebration of the beauty and power
of these sacred texts to our community.”
Three Volumes at Saint John’s University
The Book of Psalms joins Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, which came to
Saint John’s in May 2002, and Pentateuch, which arrived in August 2003. Like
the first two volumes, Psalms will be digitally imaged in preparation for a
national exhibition premiering at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts from
April 17 through July 3, 2005.
Gospels and Acts of the Apostles is 135 pages. It has more than 25
illuminations, including full-page frontispiece illuminations for each of
the four gospels and several others throughout the volume. Some of the
prominent illuminations include Birth of Christ, Raising of Lazarus,
Crucifixion, Last Supper and Pentecost.
Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, has 158 pages of
beautiful text and illuminations. Prominent illuminations in this volume
include Creation, Garden of Eden, Ten Commandments and Death of
Moses.
The Book of Psalms has 80 pages and consists of five books, paralleling
the Pentateuch. It is unlike any other volume in The Saint John’s Bible.
Psalms has its own font, a lighter weight script, which underscores the
melodic and poetic nature of Psalms. Instead of illuminations like those
seen in Gospels and Acts and Pentateuch, Mr. Jackson did special treatments,
which hint at the ways in which we might “see” Psalms if they are sung or
read poetically.
“Viewers now have three volumes to survey,” said Fr. Eric Hollas, OSB,
associate director of Arts and Culture at Saint John’s University. “People
are impressed immediately by the sheer physicality of The Saint John’s
Bible. Most have never seen a book this large. Most have never seen such
an endless stream of elegant script. Most have seen neither gold-leaf nor
pages of vellum to which it is applied.”
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 former 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 ¾” by 23 ½” volumes: Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, Book of
Psalms, Pentateuch, Wisdom and Poetic Books, Prophets, Historical Books, and
Letters and The Book of 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 illustrations using traditional tools,
colors, inks and metals, inviting other scribes from around the world to
consult and work with him at the scriptorium. Illustrations 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 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.
Saint John’s will return to the Vatican in May to present a limited full
size reproduction of Gospels and Act of the Apostles. The first trip
to Vatican occurred in August 1999 when a limited edition of the first
written page, Genealogy of Jesus, was presented. Br. Dietrich
Reinhart, OSB and John Klassen, OSB, abbot of Saint John’s Abbey, will join
Mr. Jackson and his wife, Mabel, on the trip to Rome. More than 65 people
have signed up for a trip that includes visits to Subiaco, renowned for St.
Benedict’s Monastery and Sant’ Anselmo, a Benedictine Church.
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,
art 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 including churches, parishes, schools and universities. In
addition to touring the Bible to museums and libraries globally, Saint
John’s has plans to publish a trade edition of The Saint John’s Bible
as well as a CD-ROM version to be distributed worldwide. 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, more than 550 individuals, families, foundations and corporations
have contributed over $3 million 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 and Seminary and the Preparatory School. Over the years, Saint
John’s has become home to a number of other renowned institutions including:
The 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, residential undergraduate colleges. Together, the
colleges challenge students to live balanced lives of learning, work,
leadership and service in a changing world.
For additional information or visuals, please contact:
Linda Orzechowski
The Saint John's Bible
(320) 363-3514
lorzechowsk@csbsju.edu
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