Cornish literature
Cornish literature refers to written works in the Cornish language. The earliest surviving texts are in verse and date from the 14th century. There are virtually none from the 18th and 19th centuries but writing in revived forms of Cornish began in the early 20th century. Medieval verse and drama The Prophecy of Ambrosius Merlin concerning the Seven Kings is a 12th-century poem written ca. 1144 by John of Cornwall in Latin, with some of the marginal notes in Cornish. John stated that the work was a translation based on an earlier document written in the Cornish language. The manuscript of the poem, on a codex currently held at the Vatican Library, is unique. It attracted little attention from the scholarly world until 1876, when Whitley Stokes undertook a brief analysis of the Cornish and Welsh vocabulary found in John's marginal commentary. These notes are among the earliest known writings in the Cornish language. In 2001 this important work was translated back into Cornish by Julyan Holmes. Pascon agan Arluth ('The Passion of our Lord'), a poem of 259 eight-line verses probably composed around 1375, is one of the earliest surviving works of Cornish literature. The most important work of literature surviving from the Middle Cornish period is the Cornish Ordinalia, a 9000-line religious verse drama which had probably reached its present form by 1400. The Ordinalia consists of three mystery plays, Origo Mundi, Passio Christi and Resurrexio Domini, meant to be performed on successive days. Such plays were performed in a Plain an Gwarry (Playing place). In 1981, the Breton library Preder edited it in modern scripture under the name of Passyon agan arluth. The longest single surviving work of Cornish literature is Beunans Meriasek (The Life of Meriasek), a two-day verse drama dated 1504, but probably copied from an earlier manuscript. Other notable pieces of Cornish literature include the Creation of the World (with Noah's Flood) which is a miracle play similar to Origo Mundi but in a much later manuscript (1611); the Charter Fragment, a short poem about marriage, believed to be the earliest connected text in the language; and Beunans Ke, another saint's play only discovered in 2000, notable for including some Arthurian material. Prose works Tregear Homilies The earliest surviving examples of Cornish prose are the Tregear Homilies, a series of 12 Catholic sermons written in English and translated by John Tregear in around 1560, to which a thirteenth homily The Sacrament of the Alter was added by another hand. Twelve of the thirteen homilies in Edmund Bonner's (1555; ten of these were by John Harpsfield, two by Henry Pendleton and one by Bonner himself) were translated into Cornish by John Tregear, and are now the largest single work of traditional Cornish prose. The thirteenth homily in the Cornish translation is taken from an unidentified source. Tregear was "not a skilled translator", and often used English loanwords or loan translations. According to Alan Kent, this could have been when Tregear was unable to remember the