One of the few surviving documents in the Gothic language, and one of the finest extant examples of a purple manuscript, the Codex Argenteus is a genuine treasure. Its thin vellum pages are dyed a rich purple colour, and the writing is in silver ink with gold accents. (For this reason, the name of the manuscript itself means "silver book" in Latin.) The codex is currently bound in an elaborate silver cover; its original binding is now lost.

The bishop Ulfilas, also known as Wulfila ("little wolf"), was responsible for translating the gospels into the Gothic language sometime in the fourth century. Ulfilas had replaced the runic alphabet that the Goths had been using with a formal alphabet based loosely on Greek.

This particular manuscript was commissioned a couple of centuries later, probably by the Ostrogothic king known to history as Theodoric the Great. The book is an evangelarium -- that is to say, a cross-referenced edition of the four gospels, as opposed to a complete New Testament. (The cross-references are listed in the four arches that decorate the bottom of each page.)

The codex was originally created in Ravenna, Italy, but 187 of the surviving 188 leaves are now kept in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. The remaining page, known as the "Speyer Leaf" (after the cathedral in which it is housed) or the "Haffner leaf" (after Franz Haffner, the man who discovered it in 1970) currently resides in Germany. Originally the codex contained 336 leaves.

The travels of the manuscript between its creation in Italy in the sixth century and its rediscovery in the Werden monastery in Germany in the sixteenth are mostly unknown, and the subject of a great deal of speculation among scholars. How and when the pages were separated is also uncertain.

The Gothic text of the codex was published for the first time in 1665 and has been republished numerous times since. A facsmile edition of the volume was created by Theodor Svedberg -- the same man who won the Nobel prize in chemistry -- in 1927. That edition has since been digitized and is now published on the Uppsala University Library's web page.

Further Reading

You can see high-quality scans of pages from the codex on the Uppsala University web page here.