Priceless artifacts from the era in which Irish and Scottish missionaries helped preserve and renew European Christianity, all fifteen were of worldwide importance for the history of religion, culture, language, and paleography. One of them, for example—the Grammatica Prisciana, c. 845—is today the main source for the philology of Old Irish. How, then, did the monks of St. Gall treat the Irish manuscripts? Out of the fifteen, a total of eleven were cut into fragments.
