Afterword

Summary

The poetry we find in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 has been split into modern editions of individual poems. As noted at various points in this book, criticism has often viewed the manuscript poetry as part of a deliberately constructed sequence, one that, in J. R. Hall's terms for instance, has the overarching unity of a theological epic of redemption. Studies of the poems in Junius 11 have often focused on their ‘heroic’ themes, verbal patterns, or on their response to apocrypha; studies of the manuscript as a compilation, on the other hand, have often (though not always) moved away from sustained close readings of the poetry and focused on what its palaeographical features can tell us about when it was made, or on the transmission histories of combined poems such as those that make up the Junius 11 Genesis. Translations of the Junius 11 poetry have reworked the first part of the codex (‘Liber I’), taken the second part (‘Liber II’, or Christ and Satan) out of its material context, or re-arranged the texts into new sequences. Digital facsimiles have also encouraged us to view manuscript pages and illuminations in single, stand-alone images, rather than offering clearer representations of the manuscript open at its spine as it would appear to a reader in touching distance of the material object itself. Throughout the history of scholarship on this manuscript, one line of approach has usually meant the absence of another, and Junius 11, while it demands we engage with it through a combination of critical perspectives, proves resistant to such methods still.

How do we read the empty gaps left for illuminations alongside the section numbers that suggest a desire to have this verse read in sequence? How can we fully explain the addition of Christ and Satan to the project after the initial work on ‘Liber I’ had slowed down? There are other things to consider, too. Offering a reading of a single poem like Genesis A soon runs into a need to acknowledge its interpolation, Genesis B, thus changing the very shape of the ‘poem’ as a composition to be studied. Attempts to recover the historical and cultural forces that led to the bringing of poems together in Junius 11 might have to address different and obscured legacies, such as Genesis B's relationship to the Saxon Genesis, for example, or the possibility that Christ and Satan was at one time several different poems.