The Beatus of Sant-Sever was illuminated in the middle of the 11th century by Stephanus Garsia for Gregorio Montaner, the then abbot of the monastery of Saint-Sever, Gascogny (France).
It contains 592 pages and more than 140 miniatures depicting the best and most primitive Romanic art.
The manuscript is retained as ms.lat. 8878 of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris.
It is a transcript of the comments to the revelations recounted by John, by Beatus of Liébana, a monk who wrote about and transcripted the revelations of John towards 786, in the Asturies, Spain.
It includes four chapters containing : the Evangelists, the genealogy of Christ, John's 22 Revelations and the Book of Daniel .
There are twenty four remaining Beatus today, most of which come from the North of Spain. The Beatus of Saint-Sever is the exception, being the only French one.
Completed approximately fifty years after the founding of the monastery, in the middle of the XI-th century, the Beatus bears witness to the highest standard bull89a.gifof perfection, and the mastery and knowledge the "scriptorium" of the Cap of Gascony had reached by then.
It shows us that, at the beginning of the second millennium, Saint-Sever was a center of cultural acheivement : these men knew the African (Copt in particular), Islamic, oriental, Irish (celtic) cultures...
The Beatus of Saint-Sever is the revelation of a society and of its times, through its weaponry or amusing illustrations.
Finally, it is an immense book of poetry.
We present to you the entire existing miniatures ; 14 of them are either missing or lost. Only the map of the world (folio 45V-45 Ter) was finally retrived and placed by Avezac in 1867 in a Paris library.

The document bears the arms of the cardinals of Sourdis, who were archbishops of Bordeaux, France, in the XVI-th century; one of the two brothers took it, and thus saved it from the sack of Saint-Sever's abbey by the Protestant troops of Montgomery in 1569.
Some notes, by the pictures, or numbers of the biblical sources will enable you to follow the the story and therefore to understand the prints.
The complete reading of the 140 pages of theaguila89a.gif site may appear rather long. So, a summary of the work is to be found in the "VISITE EXPRESS" chapter (16 pages).
We would like to thank and acknowledge the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for allowing us to reproduce photographs on the Saint-Sever web site.
We are proud to present, for the very first time on the web, a major work of our patrimony in its entirety, and that other authors will follow us.

Paul Dubedat
Paul Dubedat is the creator and responsible of the museum of the Jacobins in Saint-Sever

TECHNICAL NOTES
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The website is in french but we included the complete texts of John's revelations and Daniel's book. The links on the left frame lead to them.
We remind you that you are not allowed to copy any picture or comment of this website which is copyrighted to the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
and Ville de Saint-Sever.
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