VERCELLI BOOK, THE

(Codex Vercellensis)

(10th century)

Codex CXVII of the chapter library of the cathedral in Vercelli, Italy, is a manuscript generally known as The Vercelli Book. This is one of four manuscripts containing virtually all the extant poetry in OLD ENGLISH. The manuscript seems to have been copied in the late 10th century by a monastic scribe, possibly at Worcester, and is made up of 135 folios containing 23 sermons interspersed with six poems on religious subjects. The best known of these areThe DREAM OF THE ROODand two poems attributed to CYNEWULF, namedELENEandThe FATES OF THE APOSTLESby modern editors.

The scribe seems to have constructed the text from a number of different pieces that came to him, with no particular plan in mind.This is apparent, in part, because he also seems to have copied the dialects of each of the different texts. It has been suggested that there is some thematic connection between the sermons and the poems that occur between them—for example the poemsSoul and BodyandFalseness of Menare placed immediately following a group of sermons dealing with penitence and Judgment Day. But such connections are rather loose.

How this manuscript of Old English religious prose and poetry came to belong to a cathedral in Italy is something of a mystery. It was discovered in Vercelli in 1822, by a German jurist, Friedrich Blume, while he was browsing for legal manuscripts. One suggestion is that it had belonged to a hospice for English pilgrims that had been founded in Vercelli in the 13th century.

■ Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie.The Vercelli Book. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.