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Aside from the cowherd, Caedmon, credited by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People with composing the first and greatest Christian poem in Old English, there is only one other Anglo-Saxon poet whom we know by name, Cynewulf. Within the already limited corpus of surviving verse, four pieces by this early ninth-century cleric include the acrostic signatures in runes that establish his authorship. Though some may speculate, on stylistic grounds, that other poems were written by Cynewulf, we can with confidence only ascribe to him two works from the Vercelli manuscript (The Fates of the Apostles and Elene) and two from the Exeter Book (Christ II and Juliana). Of these, three to varying degrees concern the devil: Satan himself addresses the Jews assembled by Constantine's mother on her quest to discover the true cross in Elene; integral to the sermon that is Cynewulf 's "Ascension poem," we find explicit references to the war in Heaven, the Harrowing of Hell, and the on-going spiritual assault on mankind. In the third, Juliana, a satartic emissary assails and acts as a foil to the imprisoned virgin who, threatened with torture both by her own father and the pagan governor of Nicomedia, Eleusius, still refuses to marry Eleusius and embrace his gods.
The emissary that visits Juliana in her dungeon comes to coerce her to comply with the wishes of her incarcerator, exhorting her capitulation by arguing in the guise of an angel that his heavenly boss commands she spare herself the otherwise unavoidable agony and offer sacrifice to her suitor's deities. The saintly maiden calls upon God to authenticate the interloper's identity, and a voice from above promptly exposes the devil, advising Juliana to wrestle him into submission and exact, from Adam and Eve's temptation on, a full confession of his earthly missions. Though a hiatus in the manuscript at this juncture must have contained some portion of the emissary's initial response, much still remains of his litany of mischief.
The style and substance of the devil's disclosure has been the subject of scholarly consideration periodically through the years, and as such, a brief review of some pertinent observations below precedes my own argument that Cynewulf encodes within the text the specific identity of...