Word: scriptoriae
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...extremely limited: a narrow range of pigments, a relatively small number of motifs and, as the Met's catalogue points out, "no tradition of representational art and no background of iconology." But the early Irish monks did have world enough and time. The bare silence of the scriptoria ensured that. Kells remains the stupendous proof of how, under certain conditions, the hermetic life breeds an ecstatic liberty. In its minutely traced webs of knotwork, its dazzling combinations and repetitions, its mazes and meanders, spirals, volutes, in the fishlike stiffness of its human figures and the bizarre twinings and clonings...
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