A seventh-century monastery on Skellig Michael, off the Irish coast, and a page from the Book of Kells.

“At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. . . . [T]hey found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? . . . The result of such why-is-the-sky-blue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world has ever seen.”

—Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, 1995.