Researchers in Ireland uncover medieval book in Rome with oldest English poem

The researchers in Ireland said they were stunned after finding a medieval volume in a Roman library that contains what they described as the oldest surviving English poem. Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English, told The Associated Press that she and colleagues were “extremely surprised” when they reviewed the digitized pages and realized the poem they were seeking was embedded within the main body of Latin text. Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity, said Caedmon’s poem is regarded as the start of English literature.

Magnanti and Faulkner said the poem appears in a copy of the Venerable Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” a history that is widely reproduced in the Middle Ages, with “almost 200 manuscripts,” according to Faulkner. They said the manuscript they found dates to the 9th century and includes “Caedmon’s Hymn” composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century. Magnanti said the placement of the poem within the Latin text made the find especially notable, telling AP: “It was extraordinary.”

The researchers said the earlier known manuscripts that include the same Old English poem contain it as afterthoughts—translated from Latin and added to the margins or appended rather than inserted into the main text—according to Magnanti and Faulkner. They said the Roman example therefore provides a different window into how early English writing was circulated and treated in medieval copying practices.

Faulkner said that, prior to the Rome manuscript discovery, the earliest copy known to researchers dated to the early 12th century, making the Rome find “three centuries earlier.” He tied the significance to what that earlier date suggests about the attention paid to English by the early 9th century. Researchers also said the circumstances of the discovery were “something of a miracle,” as the book had been present in the library without receiving sustained scholarly study.

The report said the manuscript’s provenance involves repeated transfers across centuries and locations. Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome’s National Central Library, said monks transcribed the Bede history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola near modern-day Modena in northern Italy. She said the abbey’s importance declined in the 17th century, when its collection was moved through a series of institutions in Rome before being transferred to the Vatican and later to a small church.

Longo said some of the texts went missing, then reappeared in the early 19th century among the holdings of international collectors. She said Thomas Phillipps acquired the copy, then sold pieces of his collection as he fell on hard times, and that Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer later secured the book. Longo said it later arrived in New York City in the trove of Austrian-born rare bookseller H.P. Kraus during the 20th century.

Italian officials, Longo said, pursued missing manuscripts from the Nonantola abbey through worldwide searches, buying items at auctions and from collectors; she said the culture ministry purchased the Bede copy from Kraus in 1972. Longo said the manuscript then remained in Rome’s library, where it received “scant notice,” until Magnanti began studying Bede’s history and compiled a catalog of extant copies.

Magnanti told AP that she knew the book was listed in the library catalog, and said she had concluded it was still there. She said she emailed the library, which confirmed the manuscript was in its stacks, and that three months later she received digital images of the entire volume. The researchers said the digitization process continued, with the library making rare material available through its website as part of a broader project to provide access to researchers internationally.

In explaining the poem’s origins, Faulkner repeated a tradition in which Caedmon composed “Caedmon’s Hymn” after being prompted by events at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. Faulkner said Caedmon left a feast, went to bed, and in a dream received instructions to sing about creation, producing the “nine-line hymn.”