First, g’mar chatima tovah and chag sameach to those honoring this day. This year, Yom Kippur happens to fall on the feast of Ceolfrith. Other early medieval saint connoisseurs may know of him, but I wanted to highligh a few brief comments about him today.

Ceolfrith moves in a flock — I say flock, but these would opinionated and bright sheep — of Northern Anglisc churchmen, who did much to preserve spiritual and intellectual rigor in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. That puissant herd would consist of Theodore of Tarsus, Benedict Biscop, and ultimately, the Venerable Bede, along with a host of other powerful personalities like Wilfrid of Ripon.

Ceolfrith ever strove to improve monastic discipline, both for himself and his fellow monks. He abandoned one monastery because he wished to live with greater austerity than that house afforded.

But my chief admiration of Ceolfrith occurs in his production of the Codex Amiatinus, the oldest extant edition of the full Latin Bible, or Vulgate. In fact, Ceolfrith organized three copies, two of which survive in fragments and pages¹, and the Codex Amiatinus itsefl; Ceolfrith died on the way to Rome to deliver the manuscript.

Books are important; we preserve and enhance our civilization with them.

Go read one today.

Be well,

Spencer C. Woolley

1. The feature image is a leaf from the so-called Ceolfrid/Ceolfrith Bible, pieces of which ended up scattered all over England. ↩︎