Lindisfarne Gospels

The Old English gloss added to the Lindisfarne Gospels is the earliest surviving English rendering to cover all four Gospels, though it takes the form of an interlinear gloss rather than a freestanding translation. Its scope is the four Gospels, glossed word by word above the Latin text of the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, the celebrated Northumbrian Gospel book produced in the monastic culture of early medieval England; the Latin volume thus serves as both its predecessor and its base text. The approach is extremely literal, following the Latin closely rather than reshaping it into idiomatic English, and it is accordingly categorised as an interlinear translation or gloss. A distinctive feature is that the Latin manuscript itself predates the English gloss by centuries, so that the two layers of the book belong to different periods. It is customarily cited as a landmark in the history of vernacular scripture in English.