Books include religious scriptures and scribbled jokes, giving glimpse of daily lives of early medieval Irish monks
More than 1,000 years ago, Irish monks took precious manuscripts to the European continent to protect them from Viking raids and to spread Christianity and scholarship – a glow of culture in what would be called the dark ages.
The monks did not know if the books, which included religious scriptures, linguistic analysis, scribbled jokes and a collection of tomes described as the internet of the ancient world, would survive, or ever return.
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