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The Cultural Heritage
: Manuscripts : Codex Argenteus
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The greatest gem among the manuscript treasures of the Uppsala University
Library is the Codex Argenteus, the "Silver Bible". This
world-famous manuscript is written in silver and gold letters on
purple vellum in Ravenna about 520. It contains fragments of the
Four Gospels in the fourth-century Gothic version of Bishop Ulfilas
(Wulfila). Of the original 336 leaves there remain only 188. With
the exception of one leaf, discovered in 1970 in the cathedral of
Speyer in Germany, they are all preserved in Uppsala.
The manuscript was discovered in the middle of the 16th century
in the library of the Benedictine monastery of Werden in the Ruhr,
near Essen in Germany. Later on it became the property of the
Emperor Rudolph II, and when, in July 1648, the last year of the
Thirty Years' War, the Swedes occupied Prague, it fell into their
hands together with the other treasures of the Imperial Castle
of Hradcany. It was subsequently deposited in the library of Queen
Christina in Stockholm, but on the abdication of the Queen in
1654 it was acquired by one of her librarians, the Dutch scholar
Isaac Vossius. He took the manuscript with him to Holland, where,
in 1662, the Swedish Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie bought
the codex from Vossius and, in 1669, presented it to the University
of Uppsala. He had previously had it bound in a chased silver
binding, made in Stockholm from designs by the painter David Klöcker
Ehrenstrahl. Text: Lars Munkhammar, 1998-08-12
The Codex Argenteus
Online
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