VERCELLI

See also:

• BOOK

BOOK (CODEX VERCELLENSIS)  , an Early English MS. containing, besides homilies, a number of poetical and imaginative pieces: Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Address of the Soul to the Body, Falseness of Men, Dream of the Rood, Elene and a prose Life of Guthlac . It was found in the cathedral library of Vercelli, Piedmont, by a German jurist Friedrich Blume, in 1822, and was first described in his Iter Italicum (Berlin and Stettin, 4 vols., 1824-36) . An untenable explanation of the presence of the MS. at Vercelli suggested that it had been brought there by Johannes Scotus Erigena . But the hand-writing dates from the beginning of the 11th century, long after his death . According to Dr Walker the MS. probably belonged to the hospice for English pilgrims, founded, together with the monastery of St Andrew, by Cardinal Jacopo Guala-Bicchieri (d . 1227), a native of Vercelli and bishop of the city, in 1219, on his return from England, where he had been papal legate from 1216 to 1218 . The cardinal, a man of wide learning, possessed a large library, which he left to the monastery; and the Vercelli codex may well have been included in it . Its contents were partially printed (by Benjamin Thorpe from Blume's transcript) in Appendix B to C . P . Cooper's Report of Rynceri Foedera for 1836; by J . M . Kemble, The Poetry of the Codex Vercellensis, with an English translation (Aelfric Soc., 1843-56), and in a better text based directly on the MS. by Walker in his edition of C .

W . M . Grein's Bibliothek der A.S . Poesie (

Leipzig, 1894), vol. ii . Codex Vercellensis, by Dr Richard Walker (Leipzig, 1894), is a facsimile of the MS . For the description and history of the MS. see also Walker's Grundriss . . . der A.S . Litteratur (1885), pp . 237-42, and A . Napier in Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum (Berlin, 1889, vol . 21, new series; old series, vol . 33, p .

66), for a

collation of Walker's text with the MS . For the individual poems see also CYNEWULF .