Cursor Mundi

Cursor Mundi (Latin for "Runner of the World") is an anonymous Middle-English historical and religious poem of nearly 30,000 lines written around 1300. The poem summarizes the history of the world as described in the Christian Bible and other sources, with additional legendary material drawn primarily from the Historia scholastica. It exists, either complete or as fragments, in ten manuscripts, and in two distinct versions, a so-called "Northern" original and southern adaptation, which has been described as "an attempt to tailor an older text to a changed market."

The Cursor Mundi is divided in accordance to the seven ages of salvation history.

It was originally written, as certain peculiarities of construction and vocabulary clearly show, somewhere in northern England, but of the author nothing can be learnt except the fact, which he himself tells us, that he was a cleric. He must have lived at the close of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and his poem is conjecturally assigned to about the year 1300. It is mostly written in eight-syllabled couplets, except in the account of the Passion of Christ, where the author adopts a new meter of lines of eight and six syllables rhyming alternately.

The poet considers the Bible to be one of many sources in the history of the church. He focuses on characters more than anything else where Jesus and Mary are the central figures. According to the preface of The Early English Text Society the Cursor Mundi is a collection of poignant and vivid versions of stories arranged “in an orderly, encyclopedic yet fundamentally digressive manner”.

A modern scholar would rarely find an encyclopedia with the size and vast content of the Cursor Mundi. In fact, two modern undertakings of the project add up to over seven volumes: The Early English Text Society, and a Southern version of the text done in five volumes (The Ottawa Project) simply because of the size of the text. But both of these versions are mere adaptations of the original Northern version.

Although the poem deals with universal history, the author contrives to give some sort of unity to his work by grouping it around the theme of man's redemption. He presents himself as a chosen shepherd; a shepherd who was chosen because of his talents. He explains in an elaborate prologue how folk desire to read old romances relating to Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, Troy, Brutus, King Arthur, Charlemagne etc., and how only those men are esteemed that love "paramours". But earthly love is vain and full of disappointments.

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