Cursor Mundi

The Cursor Mundi (or ‘Over-runner of the World’) is an early 14th-century religious poem written in Northumbrian Middle English that presents an extensive retelling of the history of Christianity from the creation to the doomsday.[1][2][3][4] The poem is long, composed of almost 30,000 lines, but shows considerable artistic skill. In spite of the immense mass of material with which it deals, it is well proportioned, and the narrative is lucid and easy.[5]

The Cursor Mundi is more or less completely unknown outside of medievalist and lexicographical circles.[6] Yet, the poem is one of the texts that provides the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown before they appeared for the first time in the Cursor Mundi.[6] The poem has also provided over 11,000 quotations for the published Dictionary, making it the second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether.[7]

The first modern edition of the Cursor Mundi was published in six volumes by the Reverend Richard Morris between 1874 and 1892 in the Early English Text Society series.[1]

  1. ^ a b Morris, Richard, Rev. (1874-92) Cursor Mundi. Parts 1-VI.
  2. ^ Thurston, Herbert (1908). "Cursor Mundi" . Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 4.
  3. ^ Thompson, John J. (2017) Cursor Mundi. Wiley Online Library.
  4. ^ Murdoch, Brian (2016) Cursor mundi. In, Graeme Dunphy, Cristian Bratu (Eds) Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. Brill.
  5. ^ Thomson, Clara l. (1907) Later Transition English. I. Legendaries and Chroniclers. In, Sir A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller (Eds), The Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge University Press, p.343.
  6. ^ a b Tearle, O. (2020) Cursor Mundi: The Forgotten Medieval Poem of the North. Interesting Literature.
  7. ^ Brewer, Charlotte 1150-1499 in OED1/OED2. Examining the OED.