Researchers in Ireland were surprised to see a medieval book kept in a Roman library on their computer screens. He turned its digitized pages and found the treasure he sought: the oldest surviving English poem.“We were extremely surprised. We were stunned. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw it,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, research fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. Furthermore, he said, the poem was in the body of the Latin text: “It was extraordinary.”Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, “Cedman’s Hymn” appears in some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede. According to Magnanti’s colleague Mark Faulkner, Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Trinity, his history is one of the most widely reproduced texts of the Middle Ages, with approximately 200 manuscripts. He considers Caedmon’s poetry as the beginning of English literature.The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest manuscripts, dating from the 9th century. According to the researchers, the earlier two copies contain the poem in Old English, but in the form of later ideas – translated from Latin and written into the margins or added by later writers but not within the body of the text.The discovery sheds light on the widespread spread of the English language, much earlier than previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the two traveled to see the text in person for the first time. “Before the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the oldest manuscript was from the 12th century. So it’s three centuries earlier than that,” Faulkner said.Nearly 1,400 years later, this copy of the poem resurfaced in the main public library of Rome. According to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at the National Central Library of Rome, monks wrote this copy of Bede’s History in the scriptorium of the Benedictine Abbey of Nonentola, one of the most important transcription centers during the Middle Ages, located near modern Modena in northern Italy.In the 17th century, as the monastery declined in importance, its vast collection of manuscripts was transferred to another monastery in Rome, then to the Vatican, and finally to a church. Along the way, some texts disappeared and ended up in the hands of renowned international collectors in the 19th century, Longo said.Italy’s Ministry of Culture was conducting a worldwide search for the missing manuscripts of the Nonnatola Monastery, acquiring them at auction and from collectors around the world. It purchased a copy of Bede’s History from the Austrian-born rare bookseller HP Kraus Kraus in 1972, Longo said, and the magnificent text has remained in the Library of Rome ever since.Enter Magnanti, who spent more than four years studying Bede’s history. “I knew the book was listed in the library catalog,” she said. She emailed the library, confirming that the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the completed manuscript.