Researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen and marveled at a medieval book found in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found the most sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw it,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin’s English school, told The Associated Press.
What’s more, he said, the poem was within the main body of the Latin text: “It was extraordinary.”
Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian farm laborer in the 7th century, the “Hymn of Caedmon” appears in some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. His story is one of the most reproduced texts of the Middle Ages, with more than 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti’s colleague Mark Faulkner, associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity.
He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the beginning of English literature.
The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating back to the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts: translated from Latin and scribbled in the margin by later scribes or attached but not within the main body of the text, according to the researchers.
The discovery sheds light on the wide spread of the English language, much earlier than previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had traveled to see the text in person for the first time.
“Before the discovery of the Roman manuscript, the oldest one dated to the beginning of the 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier. And so it attests to the importance that was already given to the English at the beginning of the 9th century,” Faulkner said.
And it’s a miracle they discovered it.
The book had a long and twisted provenance. Caedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a party began reciting poems, Faulkner said.
“Ashamed at not knowing anything suitable, Caedmon left the banquet and went to bed,” he said. “Then a figure appeared to him in his dreams, telling him to sing about creation, which Caedmon miraculously did, producing the nine-verse hymn.”
Some 1,400 years later, this copy of his poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library, but not before crossing the Atlantic Ocean at least twice and changing hands even more times.
Monks transcribed this copy of Bede’s story in the scriptorium of the Benedictine Abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centers during the Middle Ages, located near modern-day Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at the National Central Library in Rome.
In the 17th century, when the abbey’s importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was moved to another abbey in Rome, then to the Vatican and finally to a small church.
Along the way, some of the texts disappeared, only to emerge in the early 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Longo said.
This copy of Bede’s story went to the renowned English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps. He fell on hard times and sold fragments of his collection, and Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer acquired the book. From there, it somehow found its way to New York City, in the treasury of rare Austrian-born bookseller HP Kraus during the 20th century.
The Italian Ministry of Culture was scouring the world in search of the lost manuscripts of Nonantola Abbey, acquiring them at auctions and from collectors around the world. He purchased the copy of Bede’s story from Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and the illustrious text has remained in the library in Rome ever since, but received little attention.
Enter Magnanti, who had spent more than four years studying Bede’s history and was compiling a catalog of extant copies.
“I knew the book was in the library catalog, so I was pretty sure it was, in fact, still here,” she said. “I realized that, because of the very complex history of this book, no major scholar had really examined it. Therefore, it had been virtually unstudied.”
He emailed the library, which confirmed the book was on its shelves. Three months later, he received digital images of the completed manuscript.
The library is making more rare books available. The library has digitized the entire Nonantolan collection and is freely accessible through the website, Longo said.
It’s part of a massive project by the library to make thousands of rare books and manuscripts available to researchers around the world, according to Andrea Cappa, director of rare book manuscripts and reading room at the library.
“The discovery made by Trinity College experts is just a starting point, a single manuscript that could pave the way for many other discoveries, in many other fields, through international cooperation like this,” Cappa said.