MS JUNIUS 11 AND MALMESBURY
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 (SC 5123) is one of only four major codices containing Old English poetry (1). Specialists in the History of Art commonly refer to it as « The Caedmon Manuscript ». Specialists in OE poetry commonly refer to it as « The Junius Manuscript ». Neither appelation is satisfactory. It is not appropriate to call it « The C sedmon Manuscript » because the four poems contained within it, Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan, were not written by Csedmon (2). It is not appropriate to call it « The Junius Manuscript » because it is only one of several in the Junius collection. It would be accurate to call it « The Junius of Old English Poetry » but this is too cumbersome and hardly likely to gain acceptance amongst art historians. I therefore refer to it by its class-mark : Junius 11.
MS Junius 11 has 116 parchment folios, paginated i, n, 1-230, grouped in quires ; some leaves have been lost. Book I, that is all of the manuscript excluding Christ and Satan (which is contained within the last quire), was written c. 1000, the date assigned to the handwriting (3). It differs from the other three major codices of OE poetry in that it was originally conceived as a picture-book. One scribe wrote Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, and as he did so he left spaces for the illustrations, which are line-drawings (one painted in part, p. 11) by two artists, the second using coloured inks (p. 1-71 by the first artist, p. 73-88 by the second artist) (4). The illustrations, which must also date from c. 1000 (5), were never finished ; there are no original il-
(1) For a complete facsimile see Israel Gollancz, The Cspdmon Manuscript of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Oxford, 1927). The most authoritative description is that by N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), n° 334, p. 406-8.
(2) The view that Csedmon was the author of the poems goes back to Junius himself and derives from the fact that the contents of the manuscripts partly match the subjects upon which, to Bede (Historia Ecclesiastica, IV, 24), Csedmon composed verses in Old English : Francis Junius, Csedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum Sacrae paginae Histo- riam ... (Amsterdam, 1655). Christ and Satan was originally separate : see my « On the Ending of Daniel and the Addition of Christ and Satan to MS Junius 11 », Anglia, 97 (1979), 46-59.
(3) Ker, Catalogue, p. 406.
(4) The lion on p. 31 is a later addition.
(5) D. Talbot Rice, English Art 871-1100 (Oxford, 1952), p. 203-5. The illustrations were dated « second quarter of the eleventh century » by C. R. Morey in C. W. Kennedy, The Caedmon Poems (London, 1916), p. 191, and this dating was followed by Francis Wormald in « Decorated Initials in English MSS from A.D. 900 to 1100», Archaeologia, 91 (1945), 107-35, esp. 121, 134, and in his English Drawings of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1952), n° 50, p. 76, and more recently by Barbara Raw in « The probable derivation of most of the illustrations in Junius 11 from an illustrated Old Saxon Genesis », ASE, 5 (1976), 133-48, esp. 134. In « Viking Art in the
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