The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the capitular library of Basilica di Sant'Andrea of Vercelli, in northern Italy.
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The Vercelli Book contains 23 prose homilies (the Vercelli Homilies) and a prose vita of Saint Guthlac, interspersed with six poems:
The Vercelli Book is one of a group of four major anthologies in Old English. The others are the Junius manuscript (also known as the Caedmon manuscript), the Exeter Book, and the Nowell Codex. The Vercelli Book comprises 135 folios which contain a group of twenty-three homilies, six works in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse: Andreas, Address of the Soul to the Body, Falseness of Men, Dream of the Rood, two poems by Cynewulf, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles, and a prose Life of Guthlac. 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 could have been created much earlier.
The book is a parchment manuscript of the end of the tenth century, containing a miscellany, or florilegium, 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 (d. 1227), bishop of Vercelli, who had been papal legate in England 1216–1218. However, its presence in Vercelli has been ascertained before that, in the eleventh century.
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." [1]
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 and eschatological themes and to glorify the ascetic way of life. The homilies represent part of the anonymous tradition of religious prose writing in Anglo Saxon 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 books to survive from the pre-Conquest period." None of the homilies can be precisely dated, nor can any be assigned to a specific author.
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