Trinity College, founded in1592 by Queen Elizabeth I
to establish a Protestant way of thinking about God.
Trinity has long been Ireland's most prestigious college.
While the student body was originally limited to rich Protestant males,
today, many of its students are women
and Catholic.
For tourists, the big draw on campus is a museum containing the precious
Book of Kells: a monk-made set
of the four gospels
from about the year 800.
Before you view the original, a first-class exhibit prepares you by
putting this 680-page illuminated manuscript
in its historical
and cultural context.
Irish monks transcribed and illustrated precious manuscripts like the Book of
Kells.
Studying this copy it's clear this was painstaking work.
Cover pages and chapter heads were a chance for the monks to show off their
artistic creativity.
They went to great lengths
using powders from crushed bugs and precious stones
to get the most vivid pigments.
Medieval books were written on vellum
- that's calf-skin scraped with a knife -
it's estimated that it took the skins
of 185 darling little calves to make the Book of Kells.
To see the actual Book of Kells
you'll have to come to Dublin.
Cameras are not allowed.
Upstairs, Trinity's old library is stacked to its towering ceiling with
200,000 of the library's oldest books.
Here, you'll find a rare original edition of the Proclamation of the
Independent Irish Republic.
Starting the Easter Rising in 1916, a rebel leader read these stirring
and inclusive words:
Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God
and of the dead generations
from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood,
Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for freedom.
Each of the seven signatories were arrested and then executed in the nearby
prison -
now a national memorial that we'll visit later.
The library holds another national icon: Ireland's oldest surviving harp from the
15th century. This harp is featured on the back of the Irish Euro coin.
While the Euro, adopted in 2002, is the accepted currency throughout
the countries of "Euro-land," each country customizes the flip side with
its own national symbol.