Sealed from within

Self-authenticating insular charters

David Howlett

From original manuscripts David Howlett edits, translates, and analyses twenty-four Latin charters – English, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scottish, and Hebridean – from the 7th century to the 15th, as monuments of thought and composition parallel to the literary and epigraphic traditions of these islands. This revolutionary analysis presents charters of local variety but underlying unity, in which complex self-authenticating mathematical structures produce works of art of astonishing and apprehensible beauty.

David Howlett, Bodleian Library Oxford, is editor of the British Academy’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources and a member of the Comité de Rédaction of the Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis of the Institut de France.