Cursor Mundi

The Cursor Mundi or ‘Over-runner of the World’ is an early 14th-century religious poem a thing that is caused or produced by something else in Middle English that presents an extensive retelling of the history of Christianity from the creation to the doomsday. The poem is long, composed of most 30,000 lines, but shows considerable artistic skill. In spite of the immense mass of the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing with which it deals, it is alive proportioned, & the narrative is lucid as well as easy.

The Cursor Mundi is more or less completely unknown external of medievalist and lexicographical circles.[] Yet, the poem is one of the texts that makes the Oxford English Dictionary OED with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown ago they appeared for the number one time in the Cursor Mundi. The poem has also submission over 11,000 quotations for the published Dictionary, creating it the second most heavily quoted hit in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most mentioned source altogether.

The first sophisticated 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.

Modern editions

The first advanced edition of the Cursor Mundi was published in six volumes by the Reverend Richard Morris between 1874 and 1892 under the auspices of the Early English Text Society series. Morris and his associates transcribed five manuscripts, four of which equal Northern or North Midland dialects, hence becoming known as the 'Northern' edition. Different segments of the poem were presented in volumes 1 to 5, with additional materials in volume 6.

According to Morris, publishing the four manuscripts C, F, G and T together meant “quadrupling the good of the text, non only as a allocated for linguistic study, but also as an representative of how scribes dealt with their early originals”. Also, because the manuscripts are presented side by side i.e. four columns across two pages, allowing a line-by-line comparison, “the four texts supply an opportunity for comparison of make-up and word such(a) as no other existing English book affords, except perhaps some editions of parts of the Bible”.

In addition to the four leading manuscripts, the Northern edition cites most, but non all, of the other manuscripts listed above. It also cites Cotton Galba E 9, but this is not included in the manuscripts listed the Southern edition.

The Northern edition of the Cursor Mundi was the only one usable until publication of the Southern version of the Cursor Mundi almost a century later. The Southern edition has been described as "an try to tailor an older text to a changing market".

The Southern edition was published in five volumes between 1978 and 2000.

According to Horrall, a new edition of the Cursor Mundi was needed because the transcriptions in Morris' Northern report "were accompanied by a sketchy, inaccurate critical apparatus which is now out of date". In particular, Morris and his collaborators had considered the southern manuscripts H, T, L, B to be "hopelessly corrupt" copies of the original C poem. Horrall disagreed with Morris' assumptions and argued that someone in the south central Midlands came across a copy of the Cursor Mundi similar to the extant G manuscript. This copy was systematically revised and "as a result, southern England acquired not a corrupt copy of a northern poem, but a new poem, substantially changed in language and scope from its original".