Junius manuscript
tenth century illustrated manuscript in the collections of the Bodleian Library
The Junius manuscript is one of the four major codices of Old English literature. Written in the 10th century, it contains poetry dealing with Biblical subjects in Old English, the vernacular language of Anglo-Saxon England. Modern editors have determined that the manuscript is made of four poems, to which they have given the titles Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. The identity of their author is unknown. For a long time, scholars believed them to be the work of Cædmon, accordingly calling the book the Cædmon manuscript. This theory has been discarded due to the significant differences between the poems.
The manuscript owes its current designation to the Anglo-Dutch scholar Franciscus Junius, who was the first to edit its contents and who bequeathed it to Oxford University. It is kept in the Bodleian Library under shelfmark MS Junius 11. The first edition of its contents appeared in 1655.
Name and date
The codex now referred to as the "Junius manuscript" was formerly called the "Cædmon manuscript" after an early theory that the poems it contains were the work of Cædmon; the theory is no longer considered credible, therefore the manuscript it is commonly referred to either by its Bodleian Library shelf mark "MS Junius 11", or more casually as "the Junius manuscript" or "Codex Junius".
“Junius manuscript” enters the record as tenth century illustrated manuscript in the collections of the Bodleian Library. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Junius, manuscript and tenth can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2403729. VIAF identifies the subject as 204659128. The Library of Congress control number is n80089305. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1655.
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This entry incorporates text from “Junius manuscript” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.