The Ashburnham Pentateuch and its Contexts: The Trinity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

A fresh interpretation of an enigmatic illumination and its contexts.

The Ashburnham Pentateuch is an early medieval manuscript of uncertain provenance, which has puzzled and intrigued scholars since the nineteenth century. Its first image, which depicts the Genesis creation narrative, is itself a site of mystery; originally, it presented the Trinity as three men in various vignettes, but in the early ninth century, by which time the manuscript had come to the monastery at Tours, most of the...