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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.
It has been established on palaeography grounds that compilation of the manuscript began c. AD 1000. Recent work has suggested an earlier, narrow window for the likely compilation date to 960–1000 for Liber I and shortly thereafter for Liber II, based on an integrated dating of the text, paleography, and illustrations.
The compilation was in two stages: Liber I contains the poems Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, and was the work of a single scribe. Liber II contains the poem C hrist and Satan. The manuscript contains numerous illustrations that are an example of the Winchester style of drawing, typical of the period and region; it appears that two illustrators worked independently on the manuscript. The first scribe left spaces in the text for other illustrations which were never completed.
The work is now recognised as a composite work formed of two originally distinct parts, conventionally referred to as Genesis A and Genesis B; the latter, lines 235–851 of the poem as we have it, appears to have been interpolated from an older poem to produce the current text.
It is Genesis B which has attracted the most critical attention. Its origin is notable in that it appears to be a translation from a ninth-century Old Saxon original; this theory was originally made on metrical grounds, in 1875 by the German scholar Sievers, and then confirmed by the discovery of a fragment of Old Saxon verse that appears to correspond to part of the work in 1894. Thematically and stylistically, it is distinctive: it tells the story of the falls of Satan and Man in an epic style, and has been suggested as an influence for Beowulf, and even, perhaps, for John Milton's Paradise Lost.
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