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The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices (the others being the Junius manuscript in the
Bodleian Library The Bodleian Library () is the main research library of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, it is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in ...
, the
Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Englis ...
in Exeter Cathedral Library, and the
Nowell Codex The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Old English literature#Extant manuscripts, Old English poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containi ...
in the
British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
). It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of
Vercelli Vercelli (; ) is a city and ''comune'' of 46,552 inhabitants (January 1, 2017) in the Province of Vercelli, Piedmont, northern Italy. One of the oldest urban sites in northern Italy, it was founded, according to most historians, around 600 BC. ...
, in northern
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
.


Contents

The Vercelli Book consists of 135 folios, and although the manuscript was probably compiled and written in the late 10th century, not all of the texts found in the manuscript were originally written at that time. The poems ascribed to Cynewulf ('' The Fates of the Apostles'' and '' Elene'') could have been created much earlier. The Vercelli Book contains 23 prose homilies (the Vercelli Homilies) and a prose ''vita'' of Saint Guthlac, interspersed with six poems: * ''
Andreas Andreas () is a name derived from the Greek noun ἀνήρ ''anēr'', with genitive ἀνδρός ''andros'', which means "man". See the article on Andrew for more information. The Scandinavian name is earliest attested as antreos in a runeston ...
'' * '' The Fates of the Apostles'' * '' Soul and Body'' * ''
Dream of the Rood ''The'' ''Dream of the Rood'' is one of the Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative verse. The word ''Rood'' is derived f ...
'' * '' Elene'' * a fragment of a homiletic poem


History

The book is a
parchment Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared Tanning (leather), untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves and goats. It has been used as a writing medium in West Asia and Europe for more than two millennia. By AD 400 ...
manuscript of the end of the tenth century, containing a
miscellany A miscellany (, ) is a collection of various pieces of writing by different authors. Meaning a mixture, medley, or assortment, a miscellany can include pieces on many subjects and in a variety of different forms. In contrast to anthologies, w ...
, or
florilegium In medieval Latin, a ' (plural ') was a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings and is an offshoot of the commonplacing tradition. The word is from the Latin '' flos'' (flower) and '' legere'' (to gather): literally a gathering ...
, of religious texts that were apparently selected for private inspiration. The meticulous hand is Anglo-Saxon square minuscule. It was found in the library by Friedrich Blume, in 1822, and was first described in his ''Iter Italicum'' (Stettin, 4 vols., 1824–36). The presence of the volume was explained by a hospice catering especially to English pilgrims that was founded by Jacopo
Guala Bicchieri Guala Bicchieri ( 1150 – 1227) was an Italian diplomat, papal official and Cardinal (Catholic Church), cardinal. He was the papal legate in England from 1216 to 1218 and took a prominent role in the politics of England during John, King of Eng ...
(d. 1227),
bishop of Vercelli The Archdiocese of Vercelli () is a Latin Church, Latin Metropolitan archdiocese of the Catholic Church in northern Italy, one of the two archdioceses which, together with their suffragan dioceses, form the ecclesiastical region of Piedmont. Th ...
, who had been
papal legate 300px, A woodcut showing Henry II of England greeting the Pope's legate. A papal legate or apostolic legate (from the ancient Roman title '' legatus'') is a personal representative of the Pope to foreign nations, to some other part of the Catho ...
in England 1216–1218. In the words of a modern critic, "The Vercelli Book appears ... to have been put together from a number of different exemplars with no apparent overall design in mind. The manner in which the scribe did the copying is relatively mechanical. In most cases, he copied the dialect and the manuscript punctuation that was found in the original texts, and these aspects therefore aid in reconstructing the variety of exemplars. The texts therefore range in date for although they were all copied in the later tenth century, they need not all have been written in this period". The verse items occur in three randomly placed groups intermixed with prose. Evidence suggests that the scribe may have assembled the material over an extended period of time. Elaine Treharne in ''Old and Middle English: An Anthology'' suggests: "Although the examples are diverse, and no apparent chronological or formal arrangement can be discerned, the texts suggest the compiler was someone in a monastic setting who wished to illustrate his personal interest in
penitential A penitential is a book or set of church rules concerning the Christianity, Christian sacrament of penance, used for regular private confession with a confessor-priest, a "new manner of reconciliation with God in Christianity, God" that was prom ...
and
eschatological Eschatology (; ) concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself. The end of the world or end times is predicted by several world religions (both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic), which teach that negative world ...
themes and to glorify the ascetic way of life. The homilies represent part of the anonymous tradition of religious prose writing in
Anglo Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Ge ...
England". In his book ''The Vercelli Homilies'', Donald Scragg claims that because of the poetry, the Vercelli Book "is in no sense a homiliary". He argues that most of the homilies in the Vercelli Book are sermons with general themes, while two of the homilies describe lives of the saints (XVII and XXIII). The manuscript contains two homilies (I and VI) that are primarily narrative pieces and lack the typical homiletic structure. The arrangement of the homilies, coupled with the placement of the poetic pieces, creates a manuscript which Scragg considers to be "one of the most important
vernacular Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken language, spoken form of language, particularly when perceptual dialectology, perceived as having lower social status or less Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige than standard language, which is mor ...
books to survive from the pre-
Conquest Conquest involves the annexation or control of another entity's territory through war or Coercion (international relations), coercion. Historically, conquests occurred frequently in the international system, and there were limited normative or ...
period". None of the homilies can be precisely dated, nor can any be assigned to a specific author.


Editions

Blume reported his find to German historian Johann Martin Lappenberg, who in turn wrote to the British antiquary Charles Purton Cooper. Blume did not, as was earlier thought, transcribe the manuscript himself. Rather, Cooper, on behalf of the British
Record Commission The Record Commissions were a series of six Royal Commissions of Great Britain and (from 1801) the United Kingdom which sat between 1800 and 1837 to inquire into the custody and public accessibility of the state archives. The Commissioners' work ...
, commissioned Dr. C. Maier of the
University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (; ), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The University of Tübingen is one of eleven German Excellenc ...
to make a transcript, which he did in 1834. This copy was the basis for
Benjamin Thorpe Benjamin Thorpe (1782 – 19 July 1870) was an English scholar of Old English language, Anglo-Saxon literature. Biography In the early 1820s he worked as a banker in the House of Rothschild, in Paris. There he met Thomas Hodgkin, who treated hi ...
's putative edition, "well advanced" by 1835 but never published (the Record Commission was dissolved in 1837). Copies of his work were kept and distributed between 1869 and 1917, though some copies must have been sent out: one such copy was the basis for
Jacob Grimm Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the ''Deutsch ...
's ''Andreas und Elene'' (Kassel, 1840), an edition of the Old English poems ''
Andreas Andreas () is a name derived from the Greek noun ἀνήρ ''anēr'', with genitive ἀνδρός ''andros'', which means "man". See the article on Andrew for more information. The Scandinavian name is earliest attested as antreos in a runeston ...
'' and '' Elene'', both found in the Vercelli Book. In turn, John Mitchell Kemble partly based his ''Poetry of the Codex Vercellensis'' (London, 1856) on Grimm's edition; Maier's transcript was also the basis for C. W. M. Grein's critical edition in ''Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie'' (Göttingen, 1858, rev. Leipzig, 1894). Given Vercelli's remote location (across the Alps for German and English scholars), Maier's was the only available transcription for decades; Julius Zupitza's 1877 edition was the first one based on a new inspection of the manuscript. * The majority of Vercelli Book poems are edited along with digital images of their manuscript pages, and translated, in the
Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project
', Martin Foys et al. (eds.) (University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019-)).


References


Notes


Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * Zacher, Samantha. Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies. University of Toronto Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-8020-9158-1


External links

* Roberto Rosselli Del Turco
"The Digital Vercelli Book project"Beta version of the digital edition
(English Codex) {{Authority control 10th-century manuscripts Poetry anthologies Old English poetry English-language manuscripts Rediscovered works