Experts stunned by a forgotten medieval book in Rome hiding oldest English poem

The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marvelling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitised pages and found their 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 that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English, said. What’s more, she said, the poem was within the main body of Latin text: “It was extraordinary.”

Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, “Caedmon’s Hymn” appears within some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. His history is one of the most widely reproduced texts from Middle Ages, with almost 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti’s colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity. He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the start of English literature.

The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts — translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin by later scribes or appended but not within the text’s main body, according to the researchers.

The discovery sheds light on the English language’s wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had travelled to view the text in person for the first time. “Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that,” Faulkner said.

Some 1,400 years later, this copy of poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library. Monks transcribed this copy of Bede’s history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centres during the Middle Ages, located near modernday Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome’s National Central Library.

In the 17th century, as the abbey’s importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was shifted to another abbey in Rome, then moved to the Vatican and finally on to a church. Along the way, some of the texts went missing, only to emerge in the 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Longo said.

Italy’s culture ministry was scouring the world for the Nonantola abbey’s missing manuscripts, snapping them up in auctions and from collectors around the world. It bought the copy of Bede’s history from Austrianborn rare bookseller H P Kraus Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and since then the illustrious text has remained in Rome’s library.

Enter Magnanti, who had spent over four years studying Bede’s history. “I knew that the book was listed in the library’s catalogue,” she said. She emailed the library, which confirmed the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the entire manuscript.