Episode 7: Brandon Hawk on Old English, an audience of women, and why it’s called The Vercelli Book
Vercelli Book, folio 106v
In Episode 7 of Inside My Favorite Manuscript, Lindsey and Dot chat with Brandon Hawk about The Vercelli Book, one of the four major surviving manuscripts containing Old English literature. We talk about the sermons, the poetry, Celtic inspiration in what decoration there is, and why it’s called the Vercelli Book.
Listen here, or wherever you find your podcasts.
Below the cut are more page images from the manuscript, links to the books discussed in the episode, and further reading.
Folio 1r
Folio 9v
Folio 106v, with zoomorphic initial and a Celtic knot.
Folio 112 r, another zoomorphic initial with Celtic knot.
Folio 132 r
Further Reading
On the manuscript itself:
Digital facsimile at the Digital Vercelli Book.
Tony Burke and Brandon W. Hawk, “Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli, MS CXVII,” Manuscripta Apocryphorum, North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature, March 25, 2022.
For editions/translations of the Vercelli Book texts:
George Phillip Krapp, ed., The Vercelli Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 2. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936).
Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, Early English Text Society Original Series 300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Lewis E. Nicholson, ed., The Vercelli Book Homilies: Translations From the Anglo-Saxon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990).
Accessible translations of the poems can be found at Aaron K. Hostetter’s Old English Poetry Project, hosted by Rutgers University.
For studies mentioned in the show:
Mary Dockray-Miller, “Female Devotion in the Vercelli Book,” Philological Quarterly 83 (2006): 337-54.
Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London and Toronto: British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Amity Reading, Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self through the Vercelli Book, Medieval Interventions 7 (New York: Peter Lang, 2018)
Donald G. Scragg, “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book,” Anglo-Saxon England 2 (1973): 189-207.
Elaine Treharne, “The Form and Function of the Vercelli Book,” in Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis, and Jane Roberts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 253-66.
Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Old English Literature 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Samantha Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies, Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
