The introductory pages, which in early medieval gospel books are placed at the beginning of a gospel, often stage an antithesis of enigmatic calligraphy and clear legibility. As a visual reflection on writing and script this juxtaposition is related to a hermeneutic of Holy Scripture. The initial pages in particular demonstratively break the rules of readable and linearly ordered script. They do not require reading in the usual sense, which linearly follows the succession of words. As ‘script-images’ they must be contemplated by simultaneous consideration, that should reveal a meaning behind the material letters. Their illegibility can be understood as a visual cue for the transition from meditative reading to contemplatively seeing the purely intelligible.