Christian Celts: Messages & Images

In the last century of Roman Britain four things came together - Latin, the British language, a burgeoning Christianity and an educational legacy which included a form of Latin composition known today as 'Biblical style'. Common to Britain and other provinces in the West, it was strongly reinforced about 420 by the newly-translated Latin bible, Jerome's Vulgate. By the year 500 we find this method of composition surviving in the Celtic West - South-west Scotland, Wales, South-west England - in the shape of memorials, in Latin, cut in stone. Outwardly crude, in a minority of instances they display a sophistication which has only recently been revealed by the investigations of 'intellectual archaeology'. For they can be interpreted as structured writings, following recoverable rules, frequently allusive, some even cryptic as they contain concealed words and names. More remarkable still, we have those that generate mental images; indeed they are in a sense pictures or logically lead the reader to pictures. It was in Wales that this tradition was paramount. A highly educated and sophisticated Christian elite saw themselves as an intellectual bastion of the Celtic British, in the West, against the Germanic heathens overrunning what is now England. This fascinating study by Professor Thomas is the first full statement of his discovery of these ingenious Celtic 'codes', which must change many perceptions of 'The Dark Ages' and provide a new dimension to our thinking about post-Roman Britain and its cultural achievements.