ST. BRIDGET 
Of course it would be easy to think that after all 
Gerald the Welshman was only a twelfth century 
native of Wales without any particular culture or 
artistic appreciation who happened to have wand- 
ered as far away from home as Ireland and was 
rather ready to find wonders on the way. He had 
probably almost never seen, so the supposed com- 
mentator might continue, an illuminated copy of the 
Scriptures before, and he would therefore be quite 
carried away with almost anything that applied a 
variety of color to the initial letters and to certain 
pages of the Scriptures. So far from any such fan- 
cied description fitting in with Giraldus Cambrensis 
as we know him, it is about as far away as possible 
from his actual character and experience. Gerald 
the Welshman had traveled across Europe several 
times, he had visited France and Italy as well as 
Switzerland and possibly had been in Spain, he had 
seen most of the beautiful things of that period and 
they were not few in that twelfth century which 
rivals even the thirteenth as the greatest of cen- 
turies. No one we know was better fitted to appre- 
ciate the beauties of a wonderful illuminated manu- 
script than Gerald. His compliment to the illum- 
inated Scriptures of Kildare must therefore be 
accounted as a very high tribute indeed. It might 
be easy to think that this was only the exaggeratedly 
enthusiastic description of a traveler of the Middle 
Ages knowing little about such things, only that we 
possess in the Book of Kells a magnificent example 
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