Old English homiliaries and poetic manuscripts

Abstract

From the surviving eleventh century manuscripts, one can find a use of the vernacular unparalleled in any other Western European language until the later Middle Ages. Two books date from the 970s, the Exeter and Vercelli Books. The Exeter Book is large in scale and written in a bold clear hand; a few of its poems are long. The Vercelli Book's contents are entirely religious, mainly homilies and saints' lives. In The Husband's Message, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer we have the closest that Old English verse comes to love poetry. The poems also include The Dream of the Rood, perhaps the most famous Old English religious poem. Thirty-six other manuscripts or manuscript fragments have copies of all or part of the Catholic Homilies. The majority of Ælfric homilies are in large-scale codices with bold handwriting, clearly designed for public reading.

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