Dublin scholars have uncovered what appears to be the oldest surviving poem in the English language inside a long-neglected medieval book held in Rome.
The discovery was made when Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s School of English, was compiling a catalogue of existing copies of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and requested digital images from Rome’s National Central Library. Magnanti and Trinity colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature, said they were stunned when they saw the lines on their screens.
Hidden within the main body of the Latin text, not merely as a marginal note, was Caedmon’s Hymn — a short Old English composition attributed to a Northumbrian farmworker, Caedmon, and believed to have been composed in the seventh century. The hymn appears in Bede’s History in several manuscript witnesses; the newly identified copy dates to the early medieval period and is one of the library’s most ancient Bede manuscripts, according to the researchers and the library’s curators.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Magnanti told The Associated Press. Faulkner described Caedmon’s Hymn as the beginning of English literature, stressing its rarity: “About three million words of Old English survive in total, but the vast majority of texts come from the 10th and 11th centuries. Caedmon’s Hymn is almost unique as a survival from the seventh century — it connects us to the earliest stages of written English.”
A modern rendering of the hymn captures its theme of praising the Creator: “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the creator and his intention… He first created the earth for men, heaven as a roof…” The lines are short and compressed, typical of Old English verse, and have long been known from a handful of medieval exemplars.
What makes the Rome find especially important is its placement within the Latin text. Two earlier known witnesses contain the hymn as translations or glosses added in margins or appended later — afterthoughts rather than integrated readings. The Rome manuscript preserves the Old English hymn within the main text block, evidence that English-language material was being copied and valued alongside Latin far earlier than previously documented.
Before the discovery, the earliest manuscript witness of the hymn embedded in a main text was from the early 12th century. The Rome copy pushes that direct attestation back by roughly three centuries, Faulkner said, indicating that English was already being used and transmitted in manuscript culture by the early ninth century.
The manuscript’s own history is a winding one. It was produced in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, near modern Modena, an important medieval center of copying. Over centuries the abbey’s collection dispersed as the institution declined: books moved to another Roman abbey, to the Vatican, and later to a small church. Some volumes went missing and reappeared in the 19th century among prominent collectors.
This particular copy passed through the hands of noted English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps, Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer and 20th-century New York rare-book dealer H.P. Kraus. Italy’s culture ministry, which had been actively recovering Nonantola’s missing manuscripts, acquired the book from Kraus in 1972 and it has since resided in Rome’s National Central Library — largely unstudied until recently.
Magnanti had identified the book in the library’s catalogue and requested scans. Three months after she received high-resolution images of the entire manuscript, she and Faulkner traveled to Rome to inspect the volume in person. Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at the library, said the Nonantolan collection has now been digitized and made freely accessible online.
Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and the rare book reading room at the National Central Library, framed the find as an example of the value of digitization and international scholarly cooperation: “The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields.”
For scholars of English, the Rome manuscript offers a rare, earlier window into the language’s spread and cultural importance. It suggests that vernacular English had a place within learned, Latin-dominated texts centuries before it became commonplace in written form — and it demonstrates how many gaps in our documentary record still await filling as libraries digitize and open up their holdings to researchers worldwide.