Vercelli Book

The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices (the others being the Junius manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Nowell Codex). 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, in northern Italy.

The Vercelli Book comprises 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:

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".

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