Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 by Janet Schrunk Ericksen (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 by Janet Schrunk Ericksen Jodi Grimes Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11. By Janet Schrunk Ericksen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4875-0746-6. Pp. x + 222. $65.00. "We do not know when and why the poems in Junius 11 were first brought together" (68). This sort of statement, appearing all too often in medieval scholarship, can be both frustrating and mysterious, off-putting and inviting. We do not know: who wrote it, when it was written, for whom it was written, where it was produced. In medieval texts, clues hinting at answers to these questions abound in a manuscript's transmission history, margin markings, and in echoes of the contents observed in other texts. The mysteries of authorship, provenance, readership, and purpose are in part what make medieval studies infinitely intriguing, at least for those scholars who can be comfortable in the knowledge that many of these secrets are forever dissolved with the past. But what of reading's future, given the [End Page 447] digital texts that leave fewer physical traces than the fading manuscripts of a past age? How do we consume paragraphs with all our modern distractions? Do we tend to read less sequentially, skip to the end of a book, or perhaps even read only the first few sentences and turn to another less taxing pastime? For contemporary readers who are concerned with these issues, alongside the many other unknowns that have so many of us in higher education wondering if the liberal arts will survive this next generation of reader-surfer-scrollers, Janet Schrunk Ericksen's Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 may serve both as comfort and inspiration. Ericksen's monograph is the scholarly story of a tenth-century book, one of only four extant codices of Old English poetry and the only manuscript that is illustrated. This unique treasure adapts several key narratives from the Old and New Testament in forty-eight illustrations and four Old English poems, now named Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. MS Junius 11 exists in almost original form a millennium after its creation and may be studied at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library or digitally from anywhere in the world. However, it first was edited and published by Franciscus Junius in the seventeenth century as the work of Caedmon, the illiterate cowherd whom according to Bede was the first to compose scriptural poetry in the English vernacular. While several scholars have worked with this manuscript, notably Herbert Broderick, Catherine Karkov, A. N. Doane, Barbara Raw, and Leslie Lockett, Ericksen's full-length study is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship, and in its consideration of MS Junius 11 as "a model for reading and meaning-building" (32), it has applications for contemporary reading as well. An associate professor of English and medieval studies at the University of Minnesota, Morris, Ericksen connects the science of reading with a study of the Junius manuscript to argue that medieval readers may have been much more fluid in their approach to texts than modern readers (I would qualify, more than modern readers trained before the flourishing of digital texts). The poems of the manuscript can be read sequentially or in isolation, Ericksen argues, moving either within the text or leading outward. Using the metaphor of various entry points to a home, Ericksen explains that the book "starts to reveal an array of interests, connections, and approaches to understanding that were available to its early readers and perhaps sought after by them even more frequently than was sequential unity" (6). Through her careful analysis of each of the poems and the manuscript's likely library context, Ericksen builds a case that MS Junius 11 encouraged reading flexibility. Ericksen's introduction surveys various theories about the Junius manuscript's purpose and audience and compares it to other similar surviving manuscripts to show that "the extent of congruence between a set of connectable narratives and a book as a whole was...

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