Vercelli Book Facsimile Edition

The Vercelli Book comprises prose and poetic texts in Old English, all on Christian themes, compiled in the second half of the tenth century in Kent, perhaps at the Benedictine monastery of Saint Augustine's at Canterbury. The prose texts are homilies, that is, edifying short sermons, collected here probably not for public recitation but for private reflection. The six poems appear in three groups interspersed among the twenty-three homilies. It is the only collection of Old English homilies to include a substantial number of poems.

Many of the homilies focus on the topics of repentance and judgment. The poems include two signed by Cynewulf. The longer one—Elene—describes the finding of the True Cross in the Holy Land by Saint Helena, the mother of the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine.

Three Embellished Initial Letters

A pen-drawn initial near the end of the poem Andreas is composed of beast heads, foliage, and a dragon body (fol. 49r). Two initials M featuring beast heads, also drawn in scribe’s ink, must have been at least sketched before the text was written, because the words have been written around them (fols. 106v and 112r). A sketch of a lion of uncertain date and purpose appears in the lower margin of one page (fol. 49v).

A Script for English

With large pages by comparison with other Old English homily collections, the manuscript was copied by a single scribe in handsome and spacious English Vernacular Minuscule, which includes the letters found in Old English but not in the Latin alphabet. Some of the homilies are assigned to Christian holy days, with the liturgical assignments in English or Latin with English-influenced spelling. Four of these are in red (fols. 71v-76v).

Spiritual Poems in Old English

The complete poems—Andreas, Fates of the Apostles by Cynewulf, Soul and Body I, Dream of the Rood, and Elene by Cynewulf—all have spiritual or saintly subject matter reflecting the monastic copyist's interest in texts for personal religious reflection. Andreas and Elene are translations of Latin works. Another version of Soul and Body is recorded in the Exeter Book. Together, these texts represent centuries of early English spiritual literature.

Dreaming of a Talking Cross

The Dream of the Rood is among the oldest extant works of English literature. The author relates the experiences he has in a dream in which the True Cross relates its story from tree to bearer of the body of Christ in terms familiar from Old English epic poetry. Verses from the poem are carved on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross.

From England to Italy

It is a bit of a mystery how the manuscript found its way from England to the north of Italy, but it certainly had done so by 1100, perhaps carried by a pilgrim on the way to Rome. The spine of the manuscript's current leather binding states in Latin that it is a book of homilies of an unknown language.