An early copy of the earliest surviving poem in English has been discovered hidden in a manuscript in Rome. Researchers from Trinity College Dublin found a previously overlooked version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) in the National Central Library of Rome, which also preserves one of the oldest texts of Cædmon's Hymn, the earliest known poem in English.
The Discovery
While many medieval texts survive only in a single manuscript, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica exists in over 160 copies. However, this particular manuscript, made at the Abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy less than a century after Bede's death in 735, had been presumed lost for decades. Dr. Elisabetta Magnanti, a Visiting Research Fellow in English at Trinity College Dublin, discovered the codex during a systematic search for new manuscripts of Bede's work.
The manuscript had a tumultuous history: it was moved from Nonantola to Rome by the 1650s, stolen during the Napoleonic wars, resurfaced in England in the 19th century, and eventually acquired by the National Central Library of Rome in the 1970s via a New York bookseller. It had never been examined in detail by modern scholars until now.
Cædmon's Hymn
Remarkably, the manuscript contains the third-oldest surviving text of Cædmon's Hymn, a nine-line poem praising God for creation. According to Bede, Cædmon was an illiterate cowherd at Whitby Abbey who miraculously received the gift of poetry in a dream. The hymn is considered the earliest known poem in English, and its inclusion in this manuscript is particularly significant because it appears within the main text rather than as a marginal addition or appendix, which is the case in earlier copies.
Significance of the Find
The newly rediscovered codex is perhaps the fifth-oldest complete copy of the Historia Ecclesiastica, making it a crucial witness to the transmission of Bede's text to Europe. It also contains a major scribal error: between Books I and II, the scribes accidentally copied a sermon on Christ's descent into hell, which had gone unrecorded in all previous catalogues of the manuscript.
This discovery highlights the value of computational methods that allow scholars to analyze thousands of manuscripts simultaneously. As Dr. Mark Faulkner, Assistant Professor in Medieval Literature at Trinity College Dublin, notes, such methods make it possible to reconstruct the full manuscript tradition of Bede's work, potentially leading to further discoveries.
The findings were published in the journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. The research underscores that many medieval manuscripts still hold secrets waiting to be uncovered, and that even well-known works can yield surprises when examined afresh.
