1 The Work, its Date, Provenance and Subsequent History

The manuscript presented here is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11. From the beginning it was intended that Junius 11 be an extensively, if not lavishly, illustrated book of Christian poetry; it was perhaps commissioned by a wealthy secular or ecclesiastical patron. It was to be comprised of three poems on the subjects of Creation and the Genesis story down to Abraham and Isaac, the Crossing of the Red Sea recorded in Exodus, and the prophet Daniel; soon after the copying of these poems was completed, however, the final gathering of the manuscript was enlarged and a fourth poem in three sections, dealing with the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Temptation of Christ was added (whether these were originally three separate poems is discussed later). As was the practice in Anglo- Saxon England, none of the poems was given a title when recorded in the manuscript; they are known today by the names assigned to them by modern editors – Genesis (comprised of two poems designated A and B), Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan. The entire manuscript was to be illustrated, but sadly the project was never completed; thus there are blank spaces throughout it where the intended illustrations are lacking (after the final original illustration on p. 88). Two artists were responsible for the Anglo-Saxon illustrations; a third artist of lesser ability added a small number of extra drawings in the twelfth century. One of these, on p. 96, attempts to illustrate an episode in the poem (depicting ‘Abraham and the Messenger', it seems), which indicates that the poems were still being read in the late twelfth century. When other manuscripts in the vernacular (i.e. Old English) were no longer being read and were suffering neglect and falling into disrepair, and even being stripped of their bindings so that they could be reused on newly-recorded texts, MS Junius 11 was rebound, indicating that it was still valued; this enduring interest in the manuscript was probably because it was illustrated – a number of its drawings had already been excised by the thirteenth century.

This edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 supersedes all previous editions, including the present editor's own digital edition of 2004 published as Bodleian Digital Texts 1, in that it is a completely new analysis of the manuscript based on a thorough paleographical and codicological re-examination. Readers today have online access to the complete set of high resolution scans made for the 2004 edition so there is no need to reproduce details of the manuscript itself, including its much admired and commented upon decorated and zoomorphic initials.

The analysis of the manuscript presented here may include a plethora of information not required by individual readers, but it aims to meet the needs of a variety of users for many years to come. For example, the edition reproduces every accent mark in the manuscript because scholars today are still uncertain of their use and relevance, but tomorrow someone may deduce why the scribes and correctors went to the trouble of including them on every page of the manuscript.

So too, a translation of the texts is not included here because Anlezark 2002 presents a new translation of Genesis A and B, Exodus and Daniel. Christ and Satan is available elsewhere (e.g. Gordon rev. 1954) and since it is not an Old Testament retelling and versification in Old English it is not considered by Anlezark. Other recent translations are included in the online 'Old English Poetry Project’ (q.v.).

The maxim ‘Pride goes before a fall’ would be an appropriate subtitle for this anthology of Christian poetry since this is the overriding theme of all four poems, which are about falls resulting from disobedience due to excessive pride and a lack of humility.

Christ and Satan presents a special case since it has been corrected by a later hand, perhaps the scribe of earlier poems in the anthology. Either this corrector or a later reader also added (mostly squeezed in) a plethora of punctuation marks, and those resembling an inverted semicolon (./ – the punctus elevatus) can easily be confused for an accent mark by readers not used to this.

Life Sketch and Works

Suzan-Lori Parks, the daughter of an Army Colonel, was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964. As a member of a military family, Parks moved often, first to West Texas and then to Germany, where she settled during her teenage years. While attending German schools, Parks began to write short stories. When she returned to the United States, she attended Mount Holyoke College, where she studied creative writing with the novelist James Baldwin. Baldwin was the first to encourage her development as a playwright. At the time Parks had the habit of acting out the characters’ parts when she read her short stories in class.

Her first play, The Sinner's Place, was produced in 1984 in Amherst, Massachusetts. While at Mount Holyoke, Parks was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985. She also studied at the Yale University School of Drama. After college, she traveled to London to write plays and study acting. Her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, was produced in 1987, followed by Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, which won a 1990 Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway play of the year. Her play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), explores the issues of racism and sexism that have been characteristics of her work from her earliest days as a playwright. These plays, like the others that followed, challenge the conventions of the modern theater as they address social issues such as slavery, gender roles, and poverty.

Parks won her second Obie Award for Venus (first produced in 1996), a dramatic account of how, in 1810, a Khoi-San woman was brought from South Africa to England to serve as a sideshow attraction. Her greatest critical acclaim to date arrived with the production of Topdog/Underdog, a play she began writing in 1999 and was produced Off Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in 2001 under the direction of George C. Wolfe. It is her first play to appear on Broadway, debuted in April 2002 at the Ambassador Theatre, and, shortly, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, thereby making Parks the first African American woman to receive that award.

African American women are one of the oppressed groups of humanity who suffer from triple jeopardy. They suffer because of their race, gender, and class. As they are black, they suffer because of their race and have been forced to believe that if you are white, you are right, if you are black, stay back and have been discarded from the mainstream life in the United States even today. Moreover, they have been forced to believe that this is the man's world and the woman's place is in home.

In her book, The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir has written about humanity. She has written, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as a relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being …. He is the absolute, she is the other …. Man sets himself up as the essential as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object” (16–17). This kind of objectification or commodification of women is being created by men so that they can enjoy the upper hand over women.

African American women are the victims of racism, sexism, and poverty. Moreover, they were also denied to have access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises because of their race, gender, and poverty. The African people were brought to America as slaves and were sold on auction blocks to the highest white bidder. As they were sold as slaves, their humanity was taken away from them. The position of enslaved African women was worse than that of men as every kind of liberty was taken with them by the white masters.

However, after the abolition of slavery and the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments made to the constitution of the United States, they started gaining their humanity and access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises. As a result, they started to read and write whatever they wanted to read and write in their own limited capacity. In due course of time, they also started to write autobiographies, poems, short stories, novels, and plays too. The autobiography was one of the basic literary forms which was handled by both African American men and women. Though late, plays were also written by them in due course of time.

General History of African Americans

African Americans are the citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. However, the term refers to a racial group, most often to the people whose ancestors have experienced slavery in the United States. The genesis of African Americans was the result of forced detention and transport of Africans from their homeland across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1400s, European traders plundered the west coast of Africa for slaves. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British became active players in the theft and the sale of African human beings for profit. Africans were brought to the United States against their will to work on the plantations owned by the white in the South. The permanent settlement of Africans and the regular slave trade between Africa and the English North American colonies began in 1619. Therefore, the history of black slavery emerged in 1619, when a Dutch man brought twenty Africans in America, and sold them at Jamestown in Virginia.

The first shipload of colonists to Charleston in 1670 brought three enslaved Africans with them and the next year, Sir John Yeamans, an English colonial administrator and planter who served as Governor of Carolina from 1672 to 1674, brought more Africans to South Carolina. Over one lakh Africans were being brought in America each year. Merchant shippers from New York and New England imported Africans as usual commodities for the planters of Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. Both laws and customs defined all Africans in the colonies as slaves by 1670. The enslaved Africans were gradually employed on the growing rice plantations in South Carolina from the 1690s, because numerous slaves were required to cultivate the plantations. From 1619 to 1700, the African in colonial North America increased from sixty to almost twenty-eight thousand.

During more than three centuries of the slavery era, an estimated fifteen million Africans were captured and shipped to the New World where they were sold into slavery. The majority of slaves went to the plantations in the Caribbean and South America. During 1700–1750, thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to the American colonies each year. By 1776, the colonies had a slave population of more than five lacks. The majority of these enslaved Africans lived in the south of Maryland.

The dramatic movement of African American women is a consciousness of victimization that one is oppressed, because one is African American, female, and poor. Through their plays, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks have revealed the social, economic, political, cultural, and educational oppression of African Americans in general and especially the African American women in the racist white society. They have defined and captured the African, African American, and especially African American women's experiences in their dramas. They have highlighted their existential troubles to reveal African and African American life, history, and culture. These dramatists have demolished the distortions which were in existence pertaining to their history, culture, civilization, and the life style in general and African American women in particular. They have launched a protest against racism, sexism, and classism.

The images of African American women in the plays written by African American men are generally different from the images of African American women in the plays by African American women. In her essay, “Images of Black Women in the Plays by Black Playwrights,” Jeanne Marie A. Miller states that:

Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks wrote about the same subject that of the African American male playwrights, but they differed in terms of perceptions. The central characters in their plays are generally female. These women are often found in key roles. In many plays, the husband is dead, or deficient in the family unit. The action for some of the parts takes place in a domestic situation. However, the effects of racism resonate in the house. They offered a multiplicity of options through African American characters that came from the heart of African American community.

Alice Childress dwells on the triple jeopardy and subjugation of African American women due to racism, classism, and also by the white and African American patriarchal social order. She uses a dramatic technique known as iconographic approach of representation which highlights the problems of ethnic identity. The icon functions as objects related to other objects on the stage. Photographs, masks, signs, and paintings also function as related elements, representing the blackness on the stage.