Introduction

Summary

Over one thousand years ago, a collaborative bookmaking project was commissioned in the south of England. It was one of many to be set in motion around the time of the first millennium and it was ambitious: compilers, scribes and artists amassed material that would allow them to construct a manuscript of illustrated vernacular poetry, one that represented the cycle of salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. These particular book-crafters were innovative. They set about their work on what would be a visually arresting object that could sit on display, perhaps at the altar. Poems collected in this compilation, preserved and archived as part of a new assembly, could also be read for guidance and instruction. Poetic accounts of fallen figures and prideful tyrants failing in their endeavours would highlight the perils of poor rulership in dramatic terms, offering the potential for rumination. Those reading and viewing these poems, such as the manuscript's patrons or recipients, maybe even counsellors or ministers, would be able to trace connections across pages while reflecting on the disasters that had come to those striving to match the immensity of God.

The project was never fully realised. There are signs now that some of its production was interrupted. Yet, the work that was set down has survived and it is bound in leather and known by various titles, most commonly by its shelf-mark: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11. Despite, or perhaps because of, this manuscript's seemingly unfinished state, names, places, half-truths, legends and events have gathered around its contents over the centuries. Cædmon, the divinely inspired, illiterate cowherd that Bede tells us miraculously sang Christian poems in English, was once thought to have been the composer of the manuscript's verse. Although it is a myth now dispelled by philology, the tie with Cædmon has its strongest roots in the work of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677), the collector who gives Junius 11 its more common title. Junius entitled his edition of the manuscript (the first edition of an Old English poetic codex) Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum in 1655. In linking this early medieval book and its origins with Cædmon, Junius represents an early reader attempting to unite the poems of the manuscript as the work of one poet.