Contents
The Vercelli Book contains 23 prose homilies (the Vercelli Homilies) and a prose vita of Saint Guthlac, interspersed with six poems:
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- "Andreas"
- "The Fates of the Apostles"
- "Soul and Body"
- "Dream of the Rood"
- "Elene"
- the fragment of a homiletic poem.
The Vercelli Book is one of a group of four major anthologies in Old English. The others are the Junius manuscript (also known as the Caedmon manuscript), the Exeter Book, and the Nowell Codex. The Vercelli Book comprises 135 folios which contain a group of twenty-three homilies, six works in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse: Andreas, Address of the Soul to the Body, Falseness of Men, Dream of the Rood, two poems by Cynewulf, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles, and a prose Life of Guthlac. Although the manuscript was probably compiled and written in the late 10th century, not all of the texts found in the manuscript were originally written at that time. The poems ascribed to Cynewulf could have been created much earlier.
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