A New Early-Ninth-Century Manuscript of Cædmon’s Hymn : Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452, 122v

Abstract This article describes Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452 + Durham (North Carolina), Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Lat. 140, a copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum made at Nonantola, north-central Italy, in the first third of the ninth century. The manuscript’s complex provenance history has meant its existence has only fleetingly been acknowledged in scholarship on the Historia ecclesiastica , which has failed to recognise it contains a copy of the Old English version of Cædmon’s Hymn , the third oldest, after those in the Moore and Leningrad Bedes, and the earliest surviving text of the Northumbrian eordu recension. The article presents a diplomatic transcription of this new text of the Hymn , as well as a new critical edition, stemma, and history of the eordu recension. We also discuss its likely punctuation, which, uniquely for Old English, seems to have consisted in interword interpuncts.