SOURCE: "The Book of Kells and Iona," The Art Bulletin, Vol. LXXI, No. 1, March, 1989, pp. 6-19.

In the following essay, Meyvaert examines three recent arguments that suggest the Book of Kells originated at the monastery of Hy, later known as lona.

The genealogy of Christ in Luke's Gospel occupies five pages (fols. 200r-202r) in Dublin, Trinity College MS 58, better known as the Book of Kells. The most remarkable page of this genealogy is fol. 201r, which, unlike any of the other four pages (for example, fol. 200v), has a series of figures inserted in a vertical line down the center between the column of "fuit"s and the column of Old Testament names. In her commentary on the decoration of the manuscript, Francoise Henry wondered whether the presence of the name "Iona" had not "suggested the fish-human-figure who grasps the end of the 't' of the 'fuit'...