is not included in the manuscripts listed the Southern edition. Southern The Northern edition of the Cursor Mundi was the only one available until publication of the Southern Version of the Cursor Mundi almost a century later. The Southern edition has been described as "an attempt to tailor an older text to a changing market". The Southern edition was published in five volumes between 1978 and 2000. 1978: Volume 1, lines 1-9228 1990: Volume II, lines 9229-12712 1985: Volume III, lines 12713-17082 1986: Volume IV, lines 17289-21346 2000: Volume V, lines 21845-23898 According to Horrall, a new edition of the Cursor Mundi was needed because the transcriptions in Morris' Northern version "were accompanied by a sketchy, inaccurate critical apparatus which is now out of date".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". Key source of words and quotations The Cursor Mundi is one of the Late Medieval texts that provides the OED with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown before they appeared for the first time in the poem. Examples of the words include: anyway, anywhere, backward, blister, brimstone, chastise, chess, virginity, weakness, wickedness, willing, written, yonder, and zealot. It 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. According to recent (2021) OED data, the figures are 1,433 words and 11,901 quotations respectively. However, the Cursi Mundi is less frequently quoted in the more recent 'OED3' because the latter relies on the Middle English Dictionary, which favours Chaucer as a quotation source. References Notes External links Cursor mundi (The cursur o the world). Middle English Compendium, University of Michigan Library. Full text, University of Ottawa, Vol. 5, southern version (vols. 1–4 also online, look for ). 1300s books 13th-century poems 14th-century poems 13th-century Christian texts 14th-century Christian texts Middle English poems Biblical paraphrases Works published anonymously