1 - Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A

Summary

The opening folios of MS Junius 11 shape and direct our reading of the poetry found on them, while setting in motion the story the codex seeks to tell. Despite the blank spaces where illustrations were never drawn, which suggest that some of the goals of the manuscript makers were never fulfilled, Junius 11 did have at least some contemporary readers. Revisers reveal themselves across the book: from the corrector amending vocabulary to later West Saxon in Genesis B and Christ and Satan, possibly for the purpose of re-copying, for example, to the artwork of a second artist and other, later illustrators. Those who took up the manuscript-making project after a possible slow down or halt in production on ‘Liber I’ and saw through the writing out of Christ and Satan might also have performed an act of response to the poems and images set down before they came to work on Junius 11. This is suggested by the ways ‘Liber II’ echoes or returns to events, such as the fall of the angels, or themes, such as the might of the creator, that were prominent in ‘Liber I’. ‘Liber II’ also offers audiences the chance to re-read the other poetry in the manuscript with its impressions of the impending Judgement as well as its exhortation and the counsel it offers in mind. Christ and Satan will detail the laments of the fallen angels after the rebellion in heaven, the event that also structures the beginning of the manuscript, where the most prevalent thematic oppositions that will recur through the codex are first explored – specifically, these are the themes that circulate around those Old English words ræd and unræd, and it is the conflict relating to these in the opening passages of Junius 11 that lays the foundations for the compilation's representation of salvation history in vernacular poetry.

Genesis A, the first poem in Junius 11, adheres to the sequence of events found in the biblical Genesis up to the account of the rescue of Isaac from sacrificial flames (Genesis 22.13). But this poem, like its partners in the manuscript, reworks biblical material through Old English poetic diction. Moreover, Genesis A begins with an extra-biblical prologue (lines 1–111) describing the rebellion of Lucifer and his sect of angels.