Table Of ContentAnglo-Saxon Studies 14
THE HOMILETIC WRITINGS OF ARCHBISHOP WULFSTAN
The prodigious writings of Archbishop Wulfstan (d. 1023) encompass secular
laws, religious canons, political theory, and homilies (sermons); despite their
importance, however, the homilies have not received the critical attention
they deserve, a gap which this book seeks to fill. It focuses on three particular
aspects: the re-establishment of the Wulfstan homiletic canon, Wulfstan’s
processes of composition and revision as manifested in their manuscript
variants, and Wulfstan’s characteristic themes and concerns. These include
adherence to secular and divine law; the keeping of Christian feasts and fasts;
the payment of church dues and tithes; social justice for the poor; absolute
clerical celibacy and sexual continence for the laity; repentance, prayer and
penance; and the continual reminder, both pre- and post-millennium, that
the end of the world is close at hand. Wulfstan’s homilies indicate that for
the English to heed his warnings, they would have to be persuaded or, if
necessary, legally coerced into adhering to the dictates of a ‘Holy Society’;
and their influence can be seen in his law codes, where the book argues that
even in coercion the archbishop sought to teach and to persuade.
JOYCE TALLY LIONARONS teaches in the English Department at Ursinus
College, Pennsylvania.
Anglo-Saxon Studies
ISSN 1475–2468
General Editors
John Hines
Catherine Cubitt
‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’ aims to provide a forum for the best scholarship on
the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the period from the end of Roman Britain to
the Norman Conquest, including comparative studies involving adjacent
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Professor John Hines, Cardiff School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff
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Dr Catherine Cubitt, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York,
The King’s Manor, York, England, YO1 7EP
Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, IP12 3DF
Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book
THE HOMILETIC WRITINGS
OF ARCHBISHOP WULFSTAN
A CRITICAL STUDY
Joyce Tally Lionarons
D. S. BREWER
© Joyce Tally Lionarons 2010
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
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without the prior permission of the copyright owner
The right of Joyce Tally Lionarons to be identified
as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published 2010
D. S. Brewer, Woodbridge
ISBN 978-1-84384-256-9
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Abbreviations vii
Manuscript Sigla viii
Introduction 1
1. Wulfstan and Wulfstan Manuscripts 9
2. Re-establishing the Wulfstanian Homiletic Canon 23
3. Wulfstan’s Eschatology 43
4. Salvation History and Christianity 75
5. Wulfstan as Archbishop 108
6. Sacramental Sermons 123
7. The Danish Invasions and the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos 147
8. Homilies Based on Legal Codes and the Institutes of Polity 172
Bibliography 177
Index 189
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the librarians and library staff of the British Library,
the Parker Library at Cambridge (with special thanks to Gill Cannel), Duke
Humphrey’s Library at Oxford, and the Royal Library at Copenhagen for
allowing me access to their Wulfstan manuscripts; I am grateful to Ursinus
College for giving me the time and travel funding to work in these libraries.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Paul Szarmach and Timothy Graham for
introducing me to manuscript study at a National Endowment for the Humani-
ties Summer Seminar years ago. I would also like to thank the numerous
people who have given me encouragement and advice during the writing
of this book: Jon Wilcox, Andy Orchard, Patrick Wormald, Allen Frantzen,
Carolin Esser, Renee Trilling, John Strassburger, Judy Levy, Carol Dole, Patti
Schroeder, Becky Jaroff, Matt Kozusko, Liz Ho, Meredith Goldsmith, Nzadi
Keita, Jon Volkmer, Amir Hussain, Barbara von Schlegell, and Margie Connor.
My upper-division Old English students helped me clarify my thoughts on
the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, and I remember the class fondly whenever I work
on the sermon. I thank the anonymous readers from Boydell & Brewer Press,
as well as Caroline Palmer, best of editors.
Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 are based on my article, ‘Textual Appropriation
and Scribal (Re)Performance in a Composite Homily: The Case for a New
Edition of Wulfstan’s De Temporibus Anticristi’ in Old English Literature in its
Manuscript Context, ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons, West Virginia University Press,
2004, pp. 67–93. Parts of Chapters 2 and 5 were published in my article, ‘Textual
Identity, Homiletic Reception, and Wulfstan’s Sermo ad Populum’, Review of
English Studies 55 (2004), 157–82; and parts of Chapters 5 and 8 are based on
my article ‘Napier Homily L: Wulfstan’s Eschatology at the End of His Career’
in Archbishop Wulfstan of York, ed. Matthew Townend, Brill, 2007, pp. 413–28. I
am grateful to all three publishers for permission to use these articles here.
vi
Abbreviations
Bethurum The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957, repr.
1998)
EETS Early English Text Society
os Original Series
ss Supplementary Series
Gneuss Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manu-
scripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Frag-
ments Written or Owned in England up to 1100
(Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2001)
Ker N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing
Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), usu-
ally cited by item number.
Napier Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homi-
lien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, ed.
Arthur Napier (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883)
PL J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus . . .
series Latina, 122 vols. (Paris, 1844–55), cited by
volume and column
Townend, Wulfstan Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: Proceedings of the
Second Alcuin Conference, ed. Matthew Townend
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2004)
vii
Manuscript Sigla
A Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421
B Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 419
Bar Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 37
C Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 1–178
Cop Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. Kgl. S. 1595
D Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302
E Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113
F Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114
G Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121
H Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343
I London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i
K London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii
L London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.xiii
M London, British Library, Cotton Otho B.x
N London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra B.xiii
Pem Cambridge, Pembroke College, 25
R Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115
Rou Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, 1382 (U. 109), fols. 173r–198v
V London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.ii
Vesp London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A.xiv
W Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190
X Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265
Y York, Minster Library, Add. 1
viii
Introduction
ALONG with his contemporary and correspondent Ælfric of Eynsham,
Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) is one of two named writers of
vernacular homilies in late Anglo-Saxon England. In comparison to Ælfric,
however, Wulfstan has fared relatively poorly at the hands of scholars in the
past half-century or so. The standard edition of his works, edited by Dorothy
Bethurum in 1957,1 is outdated and incomplete; Arthur Napier’s 1886 edition,2
on the other hand, contains many homilies that are not Wulfstan’s and is
lacking its projected companion volume of critical apparatus and commentary.
The single book-length study of Wulfstan’s homiletic writing, Karl Jost’s 1950
Wulfstanstudien,3 although still invaluable for Jost’s exemplary source-study,
has in many ways been superseded by later work. After the groundbreaking
work of the 1950s, scholarship on Wulfstan’s homilies throughout the second
half of the twentieth century consisted of numerous, but often widely scattered,
articles, along with portions of books otherwise devoted to other topics and
writers. Today, however, interest in Wulfstan is at a high not reached since
the days of Bethurum, Jost, and Dorothy Whitelock. A volume of proceedings
from the Second Alcuin Conference at the University of York, devoted entirely
to Wulfstan, appeared in 2002, and a new edition of Wulfstan’s homilies is in
preparation.4 Patrick Wormald’s monumental The Making of English Law has
set a standard for scholarship that few can hope to equal, but by its nature
his study deals with the homilies only where they intersect with the laws.
A critical study of the homilies is long overdue.
This book provides such a study, focusing on three aspects of Wulfstan’s
work: 1. extant Wulfstan manuscripts and the re-establishment of the Wulf-
stan homiletic canon; 2. Wulfstan’s processes of composition and revision
as manifested in manuscript variants of the homilies; and 3. Wulfstan’s
characteristic themes and concerns, which include eschatology, the education
and behavior of both clergy and laity, penance, baptism, and the relationship
between church and state.
Chapter 1 examines the manuscripts associated with Wulfstan either
through his own handwriting or through their contents: these include not
only the homiletic manuscripts per se, but also those manuscripts containing
1 Dorothy Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).
2 Arthur Napier, ed, Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen
über ihre Echtheit (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883).
3 Karl Jost, Wulfstanstudien, Swiss Studies in English 23 (Bern: Francke, 1950).
4 Matthew Townend, ed., Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).
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