Scholars Come for the Archbishop: the Afterlife of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, 1023–2023

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide a synoptic view of what Patrick Wormald has aptly called the ‘rather odd’ history of Wulfstan scholarship. In doing so, it will also consider how our understanding of Wulfstan and his writings has been shaped by the historical reliance on stylistic analysis, both as an objective instrument to reconstruct his canon and as a methodological practice subject to personal biases, ideological trends and historical circumstances. Beginning with a discussion of ways that the study of Wulfstan’s style has framed our understanding of both his canon and authorial identity, this article then traces the evolution of Wulfstan scholarship from the sixteenth century to the present. It will conclude with a brief discussion of one of Wulfstan’s least-studied works, the homily On Various Misfortunes (Be mistlican belimpan), to suggest some possible avenues for future study.

Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, died on 28 May 1023, after which his body was taken from York to Ely for burial. Yet despite his prominence, his death received only scant mention in contemporary sources. This silence is particularly striking at Worcester, where Wulfstan served as bishop until 1016: the author of the Worcester recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ignores his death entirely, while the twelfth-century historian John of Worcester alludes to it only in passing. ¹ A more complete (albeit fictionalised) account can be found in the Liber Eliensis, in which it served as part of Ely’s failed campaign to elevate Wulfstan to sainthood. In its most well-known episode, Wulfstan visits the Abbey shortly before his death to mark his desired place of burial, which he does by miraculously embedding his crozier in the church flagstones and prophesying, ‘Hec requies mea, in seculum seculi hic habitabo’. ² Unfortunately, so impressive an act of premortem memorialisation did him little good: following the Conquest, his remains appear to have been lost until the 1150s, when Prior Alexander ordered them found and reinterred in the newly-completed Anglo-Norman Cathedral alongside six other pre-Conquest Abbey benefactors, among whom Wulfstan was considered ‘primum […] in serie aliorum’. ³ Over the next few centuries, however, Wulfstan’s reputation declined as both his writings and his political influence were gradually forgotten. ⁴ It was not until the sixteenth century that the archbishop gradually began to reclaim his place in the history of early medieval England. Since the publication of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s De antiquitate Brittaniae in 1572, the rediscovery of Wulfstan’s profound significance as an author, legislator and political theorist has taken him from the margins of early eleventh-century English culture to its very centre. The path of that rediscovery mirrors both the Early Modern recovery of Old English language and culture and the emergence of early medieval English studies as a discipline. It is thus appropriate on the millenary of Wulfstan’s death to reflect upon how views of his work have evolved and to consider some possible directions for future study.

Yet Wulfstanian historiography is a more complex matter than it first appears. Unlike the works of his contemporaries Ælfric of Eynsham and Byrhtferth of Ramsey, after his death the majority of Wulfstan’s writings circulated without authorial attribution. ⁵ Indeed, though Wulfstan’s legal and homiletic works continued to be read and cited well after the Conquest, their seeming anonymity erased any connection to the early eleventh-century archbishop of York and, perhaps more importantly, detached them from the larger programme of social regeneration to which he dedicated his career. Accordingly, the recovery of Wulfstan’s canon has depended to an outsized degree on the identification of texts bearing features of his characteristic prose style. ⁶ In the absence of other evidence, stylistic analysis would seem to be the perfect instrument for the project of canon-building, as the cataloguing of rhetorical constants provides – or appears to provide – an objective means of determining whether sufficient evidence exists to establish authorial attribution. ⁷ In practice, however, the appearance of objectivity has the potential to conceal or distract from subjective critical assumptions regarding authorship, chronology, genre, textual boundaries and interpretation. ⁸ As a result, perceptions of Wulfstan and the shape of his canon have been neither fully consistent nor entirely stable. ⁹ The components of his canon, their interpretation and their relationship to each other have been shaped and reshaped as the scholarly, social and ideological commitments of those studying them have changed. In this sense, the history of Wulfstan scholarship is also the history of a critical methodology and its practitioners. As the practice of stylistic analysis has changed and the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn from it have evolved, so too have our perceptions of Wulfstan himself.

However, more is at stake in the attempt to recover ‘Wulfstan himself’ than just the question of authorial attribution. As Joyce Hill has observed, among the more problematic features of traditional philology – including those aspects of it dedicated to canon-identification – is the tendency to privilege those texts ‘judged, on the grounds of early date and relative textual purity, to be closest to “the text which the author intended”’. ¹⁰ In other words, the supposed ‘authenticity’ of a text depends on pre-existing critical assumptions regarding the writer’s authorial identity, an illusory ‘consciousness’ (to borrow Hill’s term) which becomes the framework within which a piece of writing is judged, attributed and eventually interpreted. ¹¹ In essence, texts are ‘authorised’ – given identity, integrity and meaning – through their attribution to an author. In the words of Bernard Cerquiglini, ‘the editor chooses what he considers to be the specificity of the work, what is for him the truth, and makes it understood. That being the case, every edition is based on a theory – often implicit – about the work’. ¹² According to Cerquiglini, the philologist’s ‘quest’ is for ‘an anterior perfection that is always bygone, that unique moment in which the presumed voice of the author was linked to the hand of the first scribe, dictating the authentic, first, and original version’. ¹³ Within the context of Wulfstan scholarship, Cerquiglini’s argument suggests that the choices made by scholars concerning the stylistic features constituting the text’s specificity – that is, the criteria that make the text a Wulfstan text – are as much a reflection of pre-existing assumptions regarding the nature of the archbishop’s motives, intentions and character as they are evidence for authorial attribution. ¹⁴ Put differently, the critic’s view of Wulfstan is not necessarily a product of those texts attributed to him, but may also be a prior construct informing the set of choices used to make the attribution in the first place.

The purpose of this article is to provide a synoptic view of what Patrick Wormald has aptly called the ‘rather odd’ history of Wulfstan scholarship. ¹⁵ In doing so, it will also consider how our understanding of Wulfstan and his writings has been shaped by the historical reliance on stylistic analysis, both as an objective instrument to reconstruct his canon and as a methodological practice subject to personal biases, ideological trends and historical circumstances. Scholarship on Wulfstan frequently claims some degree of privileged access to Wulfstan’s interior thoughts, beliefs, or political vision; yet it is this article’s contention that such claims can be not only the result of our analysis of Wulfstan’s work, but also unacknowledged pre-existing assumptions that set the parameters of our study and predetermine its conclusions. My aim is not to disparage stylistic analysis or its practitioners – indeed, as someone who has written more than once about Wulfstan’s style, to do so would be more than a little hypocritical! – but rather to consider how implicit scholarly presuppositions concerning the archbishop’s authorial identity have shaped our understanding of his writings and character. In doing so, we come to a better understanding of how scholarship on Wulfstan developed and the particular influences that continue to shape its practice. Beginning with a discussion of ways that the study of Wulfstan’s style has framed our understanding of both his canon and authorial identity, this article then traces the evolution of Wulfstan scholarship from the sixteenth century to the present. It will conclude with a brief discussion of one of Wulfstan’s least-studied works, the homily On Various Misfortunes (Be mistlican belimpan), to suggest some possible avenues for future study. Over the past four centuries, Wulfstan scholarship has evolved in ways that not only parallel broader trends in the study of pre-Conquest England, but that also shed light on the scholarly methodologies that make the study of early English textual culture possible.

I

To understand the how the modern view of Wulfstan developed, it is necessary to begin with his canon itself. The recognition of those rhetorical and syntactic features that, taken together, constitute the so-called ‘Wulfstan-style’, has enabled scholars to define clear parameters for the archbishop’s corpus of writings. This corpus includes the twenty-one homilies and select homiletic fragments edited by Dorothy Bethurum; homilies I, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVII, XXXV, L, LI, LII, LIII, LIX, LX edited by Arthur Napier; the homiletic fragments in the manuscripts Copenhagen, Kongelike Bibliotek, Gl. KGL. Sam. 1595 and London, British Library, Additional MS 38651; the Institutes of Polity, the Laws of Edward and Guthrum, the Canons of Edgar and a series of shorter political tracts on secular and ecclesiastical governance; the law codes V–X Æthelred, I–II Cnut and Cnut 1018; the royal letter Cnut 1020; a translation of the prose sections of the Benedictine Office; an Old English translation of a letter from Ælfric; select passages in the D and E versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; partial revisions to the laws I Æthelstan, I Edmund and II–III Edgar; and several papal letters. ¹⁶ Yet the line separating Wulfstanian from non-Wulfstanian texts is more porous than it first appears. Suggesting there exists an identifiable ‘Wulfstan Corpus’ fails to account for texts like The Northumbrian Priests’ Law or Rectitudines singularum personarum and Gerefa, which do not necessarily cohere thematically with the remainder of the archbishop’s work and, though exhibiting traces of Wulfstan’s style, are not sufficiently convincing to attribute them to his pen. ¹⁷ Also on unstable ground are the composite homilies sometimes ascribed to a hypothetical ‘Wulfstan Imitator’, but which may simply be lesser works or compilations assembled by twelfth-century scribes unaware of their original author. ¹⁸ Likewise, the homily edited by Arthur Napier as number XXXVI appears to have originated as a revision of Wulfstan’s law code VIIa Æthelred, but survives only in an attenuated form resembling nothing so much as a Shakespearean bad quarto. ¹⁹ To cite another example, Wulfstan clearly authored the so-called Sermo ad populum, yet it remains unclear whether the homily consists of one text (as edited by Bethurum) or several (as edited by Napier). ²⁰ Even the royal legislation drafted by Wulfstan was, in a sense, only ‘ghost-written’ by him and, though the prose is obviously his, it is difficult to determine how many of the statutes were Wulfstan’s own and how many are simply reworded decrees of the council or king. In short, to settle on a ‘Wulfstan Canon’, particularly one principally oriented around his distinctive prose style, involves a series of decisions which minimise the very real problems of content, context and rhetoric affecting so many ‘Wulfstanian’ texts. The choices of what to include or exclude can rely as much on the scholar as they do on the texts. As a result, Wulfstan’s ‘canon’ is far less defined than it appears, and our understanding of the authorial identity behind that canon is less reliable than we care to admit.

Much of the reason for this lies with Wufstan himself. As many scholars have noted, Wulfstan often appears to do little to cultivate an easily definable authorial persona. ²¹ The majority of Wulfstan’s texts either circulated anonymously or under names other than his own, whether the royal law codes or ‘forgeries’ such as the Canons of Edgar or the Laws of Edward and Guthrum. ²² Even the seemingly transparent pseudonym ‘Lupus’ is less help than it appears: the naming particle ‘wulf’ was hardly uncommon, occurring as a unit in the names of eighteen of Wulfstan’s fellow abbots, bishops and archbishops. Likewise, although only a very few could plausibly be considered authors of any potential prominence (Wulfstan Cantor being the significant exception), at least twenty-five of Wulfstan’s contemporary ecclesiastics bear the same name. ²³ Nor need Lupus necessarily serve as a nom-du-plume for an author named ‘Wulf’ in the vernacular. Indeed, of the sixty-three pseudonyms known to have been used at the Carolingian court – a possible model for Wulfstan – only four were Latinisations of a vernacular name. ²⁴ None of this is to suggest that the study of Wulfstan has been founded on some sort of scholarly error of massive proportions, but it does underline the point that Wulfstan seems to have courted a degree of ambiguity when it came to the authorship of his works. In contrast, Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham and Wulfstan’s sometime correspondent, took care to ensure an unmistakable attribution for his homilies and saints’ lives, as did Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Wulfstan Cantor and other contemporary writers. ²⁵ Wulfstan’s reticence thus seems to have been a relatively deliberate choice that enabled him to foreground the text rather than the identity of the author behind it, but one that also created an opening for readers to generate their own constructions of his personality and motives.

This argument should not be taken too far, however. It is worth noting that many of Wulfstan’s compositions survive in manuscripts compiled under his direction, making a clear attribution of authorship unnecessary. Moreover, evidence does survive that Wulfstan was not quite as reluctant to craft an authorial persona as he appears. Suggestive in this context is the final clause of the Latin version of VI Æthelred, which adds the sentence, ‘Ego N eadem […] litteris infixi’, with Þulfstanus superscribed over the N. ²⁶ Although not quite a claim of authorship, this passage does assert Wulfstan’s authority over the text. Similarly, a series of verses added in what has been identified as Wulfstan’s hand to British Library, Cotton Vespasian A.xiv, a collection of letters by Alcuin, reads in part:

Floret in hoc opere pia mentio presulus archi.

Wlfstani cui det dominus pia regna polorum.

Et sibi commissos tueatur ab hosti maligno.

Pontificis bonitas manet hic memoranda ierarchi.

Wlfstani supero qui sit conscriptus in albo.

Est laus uulstano mea pulchritudo benigno.

Pontifici cui sit dominus sine fine serenus;

Comere me comiter iussit presulis archi.

Wlfstani pietas data sit cui arce corona.

Presule uulfstano hoc opus est censente paratum. ²⁷

Here, in his own hand (and at some length), Wulfstan both claims sole responsibility for the manuscript’s compilation and, more importantly, uses its creation as a means of shaping his persona in the memory of future readers. Likewise, a verse added to British Library, Cotton Vespasian A.xiv, a Worcester charter compilation (later to form the core of Hemming’s Cartulary) assembled by Wulfstan includes a verse at the bottom of f. 101^v wishing the archbishop ‘pax, vita longa, salusque’. ²⁸ Particularly telling, though, is a letter addressed to Wulfstan while still bishop of London in which the writer praises ‘dulcissimam eloquii vestri […] sagacitatem ²⁹ and linguae uestrae praedulcem sonoritatem’. ³⁰ Although the writer’s language is somewhat formulaic, it nonetheless suggests that Wulfstan’s skill as a writer and homilist had achieved at least some level of public recognition. Taken together, these passages reveal Wulfstan in the process of fashioning a textual identity. The Vespasian verses reflect an attempt to create a persona predicated on the preservation of canonical texts of the Carolingian renaissance, one of the historical touchstones for Wulfstan’s own work, while the anonymous letter indicates an established authorial persona as a writer and homilist. Perhaps most striking, though, are the insertions of his name into VI Æthelred and the Worcester Cartulary. Even without explicit claims of authorship, Wulfstan still sought to maintain an overt connection to the legal texts with which he was associated.

Yet at the risk of stating the obvious, perhaps the clearest evidence for the self-conscious cultivation of identifiable textual identity is the ‘Wulfstan’ style itself. In its distinctiveness and complexity, it presents a unique authorial voice that forms the basis for the reader’s impression of the authorial persona behind it. And indeed, it was the distinctiveness of Wulfstan’s style that led Humfrey Wanley to identify him as the author of the Sermo lupi and make the first attempt at assembling a corpus of his homilies. ³¹ A comprehensive description of the Wulfstanian style would overwhelm the remainder of this article, yet to understand its role in the study of Wulfstan and the particular questions it raises for our understanding of his canon, it is necessary to highlight a few of its most recognisable elements. ³² Even in works intended for written transmission, Wulfstan’s style maintains many features of oral composition, likely reflecting his training as a homilist. The foundation of his style is the use of two-stress rhythmic phrases resembling – though not identical to – Old English verse. The phrases are often characterised by alliteration, echoic pairings and, on occasion, rhyme. While much of his writing is characterised by an ornate use of grammar and syntax, his reliance on two-stress phrases allows him to forcibly communicate his main points in short, easily comprehended units. The desire for clarity may also underlie his fondness for reiterative subordinate clauses, often beginning þæt is. In both his laws and his homilies, he frequently resorts to lengthy catalogues valuable more for rhetorical effect than practical use, as in VI Æthelred 7: ‘And gif wiccan oððe wigeleras, scincræftcan oððe horcwenan, morðwyrhtan oððe mansworan ahwar on earde wurðan agytene’. ³³ This overlap between his legal and homiletic rhetoric is one of the most distinctive features of Wulfstan’s style, even leading some scholars to suggest that he saw little or no distinction between the genres. ³⁴ Finally, he employs a relatively limited vocabulary – especially in comparison with his contemporaries Ælfric and Byrhtferth of Ramsey – but he uses it to great effect, particularly by exploiting the full range of potential meanings available for any given word. Perhaps most characteristic is his repeated use of the word georne, which may be understood in any given instance as ‘eagerly’, ‘zealously’, ‘sincerely’, ‘especially’, ‘pressingly’, ‘diligently’, ‘carefully’, ‘attentively’, ‘gladly’, or ‘willingly’. ³⁵ In short, Wulfstan’s language appears simple, and may even have been received as such by his initial audience, yet the simplicity conceals a sophisticated rhetorical sensibility that allows him to write forcefully and clearly. It is a style designed less to invite admiration for its complexity or artifice than it is to impress upon the audience the urgency and significance of its message.

Yet despite the appearance of coherence and distinctiveness, the attempt to firmly define a ‘Wulfstan style’ is more subjective and less reliable than it first looks. Failing to acknowledge these qualities risks the legitimacy of one’s analysis as well as the accuracy of the scholar’s conception of Wulfstan himself. It is important to recognise that concerns about the potential subjectivity or misconstruction of stylistic analysis are by no means new. Dorothy Whitelock, for instance, criticised Karl Jost’s selective use of stylistic evidence to cast doubt on Wulfstan’s authorship of II Cnut. She argued that Jost’s ‘attitude’ towards the earlier laws of Æthelred led to selection bias in his choice of evidence such that his conclusions ‘cannot so easily be accepted without discussion’. ³⁶ In a similar vein, Angus McIntosh, in his discussion of Wulfstan’s prose, cautioned his readers against their own assumptions regarding what he calls ‘ordinary prose’. McIntosh argues that readers should ‘beware in any investigation of Wulfstan’s language of accepting [a phrase] as normal prose usage’ and vice versa. Equally concerning, he adds, is the question, ‘did Wulfstan always write [in this style]?’ In other words, if you find a piece of prose that does not have the characteristics I have tried to describe, is it then certainly not by him? ³⁷ The point here is not that stylistic analysis lacks value or that the attribution of texts to Wulfstan on the basis of style is fundamentally untrustworthy; rather, it is that stylistic analysis is more vulnerable to subjective judgement than often recognised, and the failure to recognise this has repercussions beyond the strict matter of attribution. In other words, scholars’ decisions regarding the ‘Wulfstanian’ elements of a text influence any conclusions they might draw regarding the text’s date, history, degree of subsequent interference and its place in Wulfstan’s chronology. Among more recent scholars, Malcolm Godden has challenged Stephanie Dien’s argument concerning the chronology of the different versions of the Sermo lupi, which she bases on stylistic evidence of ‘verbal repetition and structural patterning’, as requiring ‘an exceedingly complex and implausible alternative hypothesis to account for all the detailed variations’. ³⁸ Setting aside the question of which is correct, the criticism Godden levels at Dien is, in essence, the same as that levelled at Jost by Whitelock: that her claim of objective analysis is undermined by the subjective, unrepresentative choice of stylistic features in the texts. Similar questions have been raised regarding Wulfstan’s eschatological sermons, edited as homilies I–V in Bethurum’s edition, which have been judged early compositions primarily because they are not as artistically accomplished as some of his other work. ³⁹ In both its strengths and its weaknesses, then, the study of Wulfstan’s style provides a useful lens through which to view many of the current debates regarding Wulfstan’s corpus and the nature of the authorial identity behind it. These debates concern not just the components of Wulfstan’s canon, but also their genres, sources and even their identities as individual authorial productions. The answers to these questions become the foundation for claims regarding Wulfstan’s thought, character and habits of mind. In other words, stylistic analysis has not just provided us with a valuable tool for the study of Wulfstan and his works, it also has provided the framework that structures the ongoing scholarly debates about them.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this phenomenon lies in the difficulty translating what often appear in manuscript to be composite or fragmentary texts into distinct texts for publication. The fluidity of Wulfstan’s works in their mise-en-page can make it difficult to determine where one text ends and another begins, whether what appear to be multiple texts are meant to be read as one, the significance of variations between similar texts (particularly when occurring in the same manuscript), and whether individual texts were composed to be read in tandem as a compilation or complementary grouping. ⁴⁰ In other words, the textual stability and consistency demanded by modern editorial practice (even in digital form) can result in manufactured or artificial texts that reflect the presuppositions of the editor more than the circumstances of their original composition or transcription. A case in point is the collection of semi-independent chapters grouped together by Benjamin Thorpe in his 1840 Ancient Laws and Institutes of England and given the title Institutes of Polity. ⁴¹ The chapters survive – whether partially or in their entirety – in five manuscripts, yet in none of these do they occur in the form or configuration that has been edited and published as the final and complete version of the singular text known as Polity. Though it is likely that Wulfstan did compose these chapters to be read together in some manner, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Wulfstan’s principal treatise on political theory is largely an editorial construction. ⁴² A different version of this problem involves the short legal tract Norðhymbra Ciricgrið (Northumbrian Church-Sanctuary), which lists the sanctuary privileges of the religious foundations at York, Ripon and Beverly. The text occurs only on fol. 96^v of London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i, immediately following an incomplete rendering of VII Æthelred. The latter ends at clause 5.2, guaranteeing the sanctuary privileges for southern churches, after which is interposed Norðhymbra Ciricgrið. The tract’s first editor, Felix Liebermann, treated it as independent from the law-code and gave it the title by which it is now known, though his own tentativeness about the text may be indicated by his periodic (and seemingly random) substitution of Norðhymbra Ciricfrið (Northumbrian Church-Peace ) for Norðhymbra Ciricgrið (Northumbrian Church-Sanctuary ). ⁴³ Within its manuscript context, however, the absence of clear differentiation from VII Æthelred 5.2 raises the possibility that it was never intended as a separate text, but instead as an added clause extending the same privileges to northern churches that the preceding clause had granted those in the south. ⁴⁴ The problem of textual divisions is particularly acute when it comes to Wulfstan’s homilies, as Joyce Tally Lionarons has demonstrated in her discussion of the ‘textual identity’ of the Sermo ad populum. ⁴⁵ Edited by both Arthur Napier and Dorothy Bethurum, the question of what actually constitutes the Sermo is answered differently by each: Napier’s rigid manuscript-based approach treats the homily’s components as brief independent texts, overlooking the connections that indicate their participation in a more extended composition, while Bethurum’s overly narrow approach to the homily as a genre as well as her desire to identify the ‘best text’ of Wulfstan’s works results in a curtailed text unreflective of its manuscript witnesses. ⁴⁶ As Lionarons concludes, ‘to read the Sermo ad populum in the truncated form found in Bethurum’s edition or as the disparate series of unrelated and sometimes non-sequential fragments found in Napier’s edition is to miss entirely the composite nature of the homily as it appeared to readers of Corpus 419, Corpus 201 and Hatton 113’. ⁴⁷ In each of these examples, manuscript ambiguity leads – perhaps even invites – editors to produce editions more reflective of modern expectations regarding textual identity and stability than they are of the circumstances of the text’s preservation and, if ascertainable, composition. This is not to criticise Liebermann, Napier, or Bethurum, all of whom occupy well-deserved places in the pantheon of Wulfstan scholarship; rather, it is to note the temptation of coherence underlying the work of even the most eminent of scholars. Despite the appearance of objective evidence and editorial transparency, Wulfstan’s ‘style’ – not merely the characteristics of the archbishop’s prose, but his understanding of textual completeness, coherence and genre – comes to be manufactured, at least in part, by his modern readers.

The difficulties raised by Wulfstan’s style for modern scholars are equally evident in the modern editorial treatment of one of the most characteristic features of his prose: his reliance on rhythmic, two stress phrases similar to those found in Old English verse. This aspect of Wulfstan’s writing received its first detailed discussion in Angus McIntosh’s 1949 Gollancz Lecture, ‘Wulfstan’s Prose’. ⁴⁸ McIntosh was among the first to note that the pointing in manuscripts associated with Wulfstan separated his prose into small syntactical units, a fact obscured in most modern editions. ⁴⁹ Although McIntosh identified a number of poetic features within these units, including alliteration, internal rhyme and rhythmic patterns reminiscent of formal versification, he strenuously resisted categorising Wulfstan’s works as poetry. To do so would be, in McIntosh’s words, to ‘run the risk of having concocted some fabulous abstraction’. ⁵⁰ Instead, McIntosh viewed Wulfstan’s rhythmic prose as an aspect of its performative character designed to enhance its delivery rather than as a marker of genre. He lists what he sees as ‘notable differences’ between the classical poetic half-line and the syntactical units of Wulfstan’s prose, most significantly variances in rhythmical patterns, a failure of the seeming half-lines to cohere into full poetic lines bound together by alliteration and different uses of anacrusis. ⁵¹ Ten years later, the Swiss scholar Karl Jost published his edition of the Institute of Polity, in which he edited several sections of the text as verse, arguing that McIntosh’s limited number of examples did not fully represent the poetic (and especially rhythmic) aspects of Wulfstan’s writings. ⁵² Jost’s decision was sharply criticised by Dorothy Whitelock, who wrote that the arrangement of the text ‘does violence to the natural emphasis’ and that ‘the printing of [Wulfstan’s works] as verse lines tends to obscure the subtler rhythms and distract attention from the building up of his periods’. ⁵³ More recently, the case for treating Wulfstan’s short syntactical units as verse has been resurrected by Andy Orchard as part of a critique of Bethurum’s 1957 edition of Wulfstan’s homilies. ⁵⁴ Had Bethurum paid closer attention to the manuscripts, Orchard claims, her edition would have represented the poetic qualities of Wulfstan’s homilies more accurately. As it stands, however, Orchard – somewhat unfairly – accuses Bethurum of having ‘misreported’ a number of texts, ‘badly mixed up’ individual passages and arbitrarily relegated important textual features to the edition’s apparatus or omitted them entirely. ⁵⁵ Instead, he argues, ‘division of the texts into predominantly two-stress phrases, as sanctioned both by manuscript punctuation and the identification of parallel phrasing elsewhere in works by Wulfstan, allows detailed analysis of [his works]’. ⁵⁶ One might observe that Orchard is merely replacing one artificial editorial construct with another and that, as Thomas Bredehoft has shown, metrical pointing – the basis of one of Orchard’s primary arguments – is not necessarily as unambiguous a source of evidence as it might appear. ⁵⁷ Nonetheless, the recent trend towards editing the works of Wulfstan’s contemporary Ælfric as verse suggests that arguments of this sort do have traction. ⁵⁸ Yet whether or not Wulfstan’s prose should be edited as verse – an assertion that this author, at least, does not find convincing ⁵⁹ – the broader point is that this dispute provides yet another arena in which differing perceptions of Wulfstan’s style result in radically different versions of his texts, each claiming superiority in matters of objective observation and transparent editorial representation, that risk over-determining the reader’s understanding of the archbishop and his works.

One final issue bears mentioning in this context: much like Wulfstan’s distinctive prose style, scholars have also identified similar stylistic idiosyncrasies in the manuscripts compiled under his supervision, those famously labelled ‘Commonplace Books’ by Mary Bateson, who first recognised their episcopal use but not their connection to the archbishop. ⁶⁰ Wulfstan’s role in their compilation was not recognised until 1942, when Dorothy Bethurum recognised them as source compilations used by the archbishop in his works on ecclesiastical governance. ⁶¹ The collection of eleven manuscripts not only contains the sole copies of many of Wulfstan’s works, but also the principle sources he relied upon in his writing, particularly works by Ælfric and Carolingian canonists of the ninth and tenth centuries. Although the inaptness of the term ‘Commonplace Book’ has long been recognised, it remains in common use as a convenient label for the manuscripts in this category. ⁶² More problematic is the temptation to overstate the coherence of the manuscripts, especially as it can be difficult to discern this coherence in the manuscripts themselves: each manuscript is unique, with widely varying contents, in several cases lacking any overlap with any other of the Commonplace Books; as many as four of the manuscripts were compiled after the archbishop’s death, supposedly copied from Wulfstanian originals, but no original survives to assess the similarity or accuracy of the copy; and texts considered the same by modern scholars occur in radically different versions, often – as discussed above – with unclear relationships to the texts around them. Moreover, the likelihood that the contents of many of the manuscripts initially circulated as independent booklets before being bound into codices further complicates any claim regarding the appearance of internal coherence. ⁶³ My point in highlighting these inconsistencies is not to suggest that idea of the Wulfstanian ‘Commonplace Book’ is inaccurate or artificial. The presence of the so-called ‘Wulfstan hand’ (first identified by N. R. Ker) in many of the manuscripts indicates that they were both commissioned and used by the archbishop. Likewise, those manuscripts postdating Wulfstan’s death are sufficiently similar to the others to justify their designation as ‘Commonplace Books’. The difficulty arises when they are assumed to be objective grounds for claims regarding Wulfstan’s character or identity as an author. The ‘Commonplace Books’ are clearly of the same family yet, taken together, they do not provide a consistent or coherent view of their compiler. As is the case with other aspects of Wulfstan’s style, the difficulties and ambiguities surrounding the Commonplace Books invites the scholar to impose a degree of coherence that the manuscripts themselves do not necessarily justify. A seemingly ‘objective’ phenomenon – the uniquely Wulfstanian codicological style of manuscript compilation – provides evidence that is equivocal at best, and the assumption of objectivity risks erasing the essential subjectivity of conclusions based upon it.

The examples above are not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, they are meant to illustrate a conundrum that has haunted the study of Wulfstan since he first began to attract scholarly attention in the sixteenth century: that the necessary reliance on stylistic analysis creates an illusion of objectivity not necessarily justified by the texts themselves. This illusion gives rise to scholarship in which Wulfstan’s textual identity becomes as much a modern construction as it is a recoverable trace of the archbishop’s persona and intentions as an author. The proliferation of ‘Wulfstans’ present in Wulfstan scholarship reflect his multifaceted career as politician, Churchman and writer, yet they also reflect the diverse expectations, desires and preconceptions scholars have brought to his study. We perceive stylistic analysis as a means of establishing verifiable evidence of Wulfstan’s life and works, yet just as often it can be a blank canvas upon which we project our own image. To view Wulfstan scholarship through this lens is humbling, yet it also highlights the degree to which research into the archbishop also requires research into the history of those scholars who have studied him.

II

The re-emergence of Wulfstan as a major author of the pre-Conquest period is coextensive with the development of Anglo-Saxon studies as a scholarly discipline. ⁶⁴ The gradual forgetting of Wulfstan and his works in the years after 1066 left him with negligible influence on English law and culture following the twelfth century, while his rediscovery may be attributed to the Tudor efforts to divorce Protestant England from its Catholic past. Yet just as previous scholars have noted the historical tendency to project modern desires on a pre-Conquest past, so changing perceptions of Wulfstan and the definition of his canon follow similar lines of desire and projection. Contemporary views of Wulfstan are best understood as the result not of a steady progression of discovery, but of a series of disputes in which clashing interpretations of the archbishop’s distinctive style reflect conflicting understanding of the early English past itself.

The recovery of Wulfstan’s works began with Archbishop Matthew Parker’s publication of De antiquitate Britannicæ ecclesiae & priuilegiis ecclesiae Cantuarensis, cum archiepiscopis eiusdem in 1572. ⁶⁵ Five years earlier, Parker had published a homily of Ælfric’s under the cumbersome title A Testimony of antiquity, shewing the ancient Faith of the Church of England, touching the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord, here publickly preached, and also received, in the Saxons’ time, above seven hundred years ago for the purpose of identifying a prominent theologian of the pre-Conquest Church who – despite its being ‘full of blindness and ignoraunce’ – nonetheless ‘denied the bodily presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist. ⁶⁶ Although Parker was unable to determine whether the Ælfric in question was the Abbot of Eynsham or the Archbishop of Canterbury, his status as a named author enabled his use as evidence that even high-ranking ecclesiastics rejected bodily presence, despite otherwise subscribing to the ‘superstition and hipocrisie’ of the Catholic Church. The importance of Ælfric’s name to Parker’s project provides a useful context for his treatment of Wulfstan in the De antiquitate, in which he refers to a Lupus episcopus, but fails to identify him with the Archbishop of York. Parker’s discussion of Wulfstan occurs in the midst of his account of the career of Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. ⁶⁷ Dunstan’s role in the De antiquitate serves much the same function as Ælfric’s in A Testimony: though he may have been a representative of a fraudulent church and purveyor of false prophesies, his defence of Canterbury’s prerogatives and advocacy for Church reform provided Parker with an authoritative pre-Conquest precedent for his own views. Yet unlike Ælfric, none of Dunstan’s writings survive, forcing Parker to repurpose the works of an otherwise unknown author to represent the virtues and limitations of his more famous contemporary. Parker found his author in Lupus episcopus, whose works served to illustrate the contradiction in Dunstan’s thought between his clear view of the mala…humanis and his subscription to false doctrine. ⁶⁸ This illustration takes the form of a lengthy summary of Wulfstan’s Sermo lupi ad Anglos. (The prolixity of the summary is somewhat ironic, given Parker’s complaints that the Sermo itself is nimium prolixa to include in its entirety). ⁶⁹ Although the space Parker dedicates to the Sermo indicates that he recognised its significance, his reluctance to quote it directly suggests a degree of insecurity about the message of the text and the bona fides of its author. However, this summary approach to the text allows Parker to highlight those aspects that most conform to his own theological agenda: he attacks ‘clericali apostatas’ ⁷⁰ who have ‘regula sua arctiori contempta’; ⁷¹ he argues that ‘ex hac christianae vitae & integritatis deterioratione pervenisse ad hanc gentem ignominiam & infamiam’; ⁷² and the necessity of repentance (poenitentiam) and reformation (emendationem). At the same time, he notes that Lupus episcopus had written another sermon ‘huius temporis historiae non est propria’ ⁷³ – that is, of relevance beyond his immediate historical context – as ‘ad vitam, ad virtutem singen dam, nosque ad divinam voluntatem reducendos […] pertinuit’. ⁷⁴ Without necessarily misrepresenting Wulfstan’s views, Parker capitalised on the relative anonymity of Lupus episcopus to foreground his own priorities. His summarising approach – which is not found elsewhere in the De antiquitate – affords him a flexibility in representation that he lacked with Ælfric, while the anonymity of Lupus episcopus enabled his use as an illustration of what Parker saw as the theological ambivalence of Dunstan’s archiepiscopacy. Wulfstan may not have served an authoritative precedent in the manner of the Abbot of Eynsham, but he did provide malleable evidence for the rewriting of pre-Conquest religious history.

Parker’s summary approach to the Sermo lupi obscured its distinctive style, thus enabling him to subordinate ‘Lupus episcopus’ to Dunstan. It was only with the publication of Humfrey Wanley’s Librorum veterum septentrionalium, qui in Angliae bibliothecis extant … catalogus historico-criticus in 1705 (as the second volume of George Hickes’ Thesaurus) ⁷⁵ that Wulfstan came to be recognised as a named author and began to assume a textual identity of his own, particularly through the analysis of his style. ⁷⁶ Wanley’s account of Wulfstan took the form of a digression from his entry on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201 [CCCC 201], one of the ‘Commonplace Books’ compiled by the archbishop himself. Rejecting the anonymity of ‘Lupus episcopus’, he begins by establishing that only Wulfstan, archbishop of York between 1002 and 1023 could be the author of the Sermo lupi, and that this Wulfstan must be one and the same as the contemporary bishop of Worcester. ⁷⁷ Using the Sermo lupi as a base, Wanley then identifies fifty-three other texts he believes to have been composed by the same author, even if unattributed in their manuscript source. ⁷⁸ These identifications are founded in part on the manuscripts in which the texts appear, CCCC 201 and London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i in particular, though he also notes the presence of Wulfstanian texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 99 and 22 and London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra B.xiii. ⁷⁹ More importantly, he also identifies significant commonalities of style between texts, including the rubrics To eallum folke or Sermo lupi; opening sentences beginning Leofan men and Her sægþ; the admonition to understandað; the use of clauses beginning with uton; and clauses resembling Gif it gefeorð ðæt on ðeodscype becume. ⁸⁰ Notably, Wanley identified more than just homilies as issuing from Wulfstan’s pen: he includes passages of canon law, episcopal regulations and chapters of what would later be known as the Institutes of Polity. Yet Wanley does not limit himself to picking out Wulfstan texts; he also attempts to construct a portrait of the writer behind them. He notes the harsh criticisms levelled at Wulfstan by William of Malmesbury and their reuse by seventeenth-century historians such as Francis Godwin and Henry Wharton. However, Wanley points out that had Wulfstan been as reprobus as claimed, it is unlikely that he would have been a correspondent of Ælfric, vir ille pietissimus. More importantly, Wanley argues that Wulfstan’s own writings, especially his Synodalia decreta (the Canons of Edgar) show him to have been vere religiossimum. ⁸¹ Wanley’s account is thus not only the first attempt to construct a corpus of Wulfstan’s writings, but also the first to use those writings as a means of generating an identity for their author, anticipating both the concerns and methodologies of later scholars. His judicious approach to Wulfstan’s work reflected both his own priorities as an antiquarian and those of George Hickes in compiling the Thesaurus. ⁸² A noted religious controversialist, Hickes adopted a more neutral, scholarly tone for the Thesaurus in an attempt (not always successful) to differentiate his work as a philologist from that as a political partisan. ⁸³ Wanley’s desire to develop a balanced portrait of Wulfstan grounded in his own writings accordingly provides a useful case in miniature for the methodology behind the Thesaurus as a whole. If, for Parker, the erasure of Lupus episcopus enabled him to advance his polemical agenda, Wanley’s focus on Wulfstan’s texts and the style in which they were written serves as a means of extracting the archbishop – and Old English philology – from the religious conflicts of the Reformation.

Although Wanley had taken the first steps towards constructing a Wulfstanian homiletic corpus, no comprehensive edition of the homilies was undertaken until 1883, when Arthur Napier, future Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, published his Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit. ⁸⁴ Napier’s collection included sixty-two texts, though as he acknowledged, a number of these were not Wulfstan’s work, but instead preparatory editions for a planned volume of anonymous Old English homilies. Napier had set forth his version of Wulfstan’s homiletic corpus in his 1882 dissertation, a brilliant example of philological scholarship and stylistic analysis that remains all too little known today. ⁸⁵ Reflecting the training he received from his Doktorvater Julius Zupitza, Napier’s edition is notable for its rigorous, manuscript-based approach and its self-conscious avoidance of the increasingly influential nationalist politics of late nineteenth-century Germany. Indeed, Napier’s approach is strict almost to a fault. His transcriptions are scrupulously accurate, in some cases more so than those of later editors, as are his textual notes and emendations. At the same time, he shuns even the most basic historical or textual analysis: he makes no assertions regarding chronology (the texts are organised by manuscript); he includes no explanatory notes; and makes no assertions regarding potential relationships between the texts. In several cases, his strict adherence to manuscript readings leads him to treat as separate individual passages that are, in fact, components of a single text. Moreover, it is a sign of his narrow view of Wulfstan’s style that he brackets words or phrases in texts that he does not view as sufficiently ‘Wulfstanian’. ⁸⁶ It is likely that many of these issues would have been addressed in a second volume, though no such volume was ever published and no mention of it survives in his papers. Despite this, his edition is significant, not only for its remarkable textual scholarship, but also as the first serious attempt to define Wulfstan’s corpus by focusing on the distinctive features of his prose style. Even more than a century later, Napier’s edition remains the most comprehensive collection of Wulfstan’s homiletic works. Of no less importance, his careful approach made it possible for subsequent scholars to recognise Wulfstan’s hand in other, non-homiletic works, especially his writings on law and political theory.

The recovery of Wulfstan’s legal works paralleled the recovery of his homilies, though while motivated by many of the same ideological commitments, increased attention to Wulfstanian texts did not result in the recognition of their common author. The editio princeps for most pre-Conquest legislation is William Lambarde’s 1568 Archaionomia (Αρχαιονομια), which included among its contents the Laws of Edward and Guthrum, the three central texts of the ‘Compilation on Status’ and I–II Cnut. ⁸⁷ Much like Parker, the deeply religious Lambarde sought to justify contemporary practices (particularly the legislative framework of the English Reformation) by claiming pre-Conquest precedent. ⁸⁸ Conjuring the impression of legal continuity helped characterise the new protestant regime as a quintessential part of English national identity. Although limited by Lambarde’s reliance on the faulty transcriptions and linguistic reconstructions of his friend Lawrence Nowell, the Archaionomia and its protestant narrative of legal continuity remained the only edition of early English law until the late eighteenth century. ⁸⁹ A new edition of the laws was finally published in 1768 by David Wilkins, a canon of Canterbury Cathedral, whose Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ eccesiasticæ & civiles both replaced Lambarde’s texts and added material he omitted. ⁹⁰ Of particular importance for Wulfstan scholars, Wilkins was the first editor to treat the individual chapters of the Institutes of Polity as a complete work. Wilkins did not completely leave Lambarde behind, however: he reprinted the preface to the Archaionomia in the volume’s front matter, thereby preserving the view of the laws as part of a continuous tradition that validated England’s protestant identity. Indeed, the precedence given to the leges eccesiasticæ in the volume’s title and its dedication to the deeply protestant George I explicitly highlight Wilkins’ religious agenda. At the same time, however, in his own preface Wilkins recognised for the first time the commonalities between early English law and that of other Germanic cultures, foreshadowing the arguments of the Historische Rectsschule historians of the nineteenth century. ⁹¹ One might reasonably detect a strain of historical nostalgia underlying Wilkins’ edition: implicitly, his treatment of the laws argues for an unbroken connection to two points of origin, the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, both of which combine views of culture, race and national character to produce an essentialized conception of English identity. The next major edition of early English law was Reinhold Schmid’s Gesetze der Angelsachsen, published in 1832, republished in a second, substantially revised edition in 1858. ⁹² The changes between the two editions are telling: the 1832 edition, relying on Lambarde and Wilkins, not only suffers from the unreliability of its texts, but also never fully escapes the ideological underpinnings of his English predecessors. The second edition largely abandons Lambarde and Wilkins in favour of the texts’ manuscript sources. ⁹³ Yet if he discards the nationalist agenda of the Archaionomia, the influence of linguists Jacob Grimm and Rasmus Rask leads to an increasing emphasis on the laws’ Germanic character and origins. Yet despite the implicit gestures towards nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism, Schmid is the first to provide reliable texts of the laws and, more importantly, his commentary and apparatus reflect such a profound degree of research and insight as to make them necessary reading, even for modern scholars. In England, the 1832 publication of Schmid’s edition led to calls for a new, more reliable English edition that would be more authoritative than those of Lambarde or Wilkins and, more importantly, reflect the advances in legal scholarship of the previous century. This desire is hinted at in Benjamin Thorpe’s preface to his 1840 Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, in which he writes that ‘a moment more favourable than the present for the appearance of an enlarged and improved edition of the Ancient Laws of England could scarcely have been selected’. ⁹⁴ Thorpe’s volume largely follows Wilkins’ in contents and organisation, though its texts are considerably more reliable and the perspective on pre-Conquest law is wholly different. Indeed, Thorpe argues that the religious content of the laws must be set aside in order to view them in their purest form as they were carried to England by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from ‘their German home’. ⁹⁵ Thorpe’s edition embraces Schmid’s Germanist perspective, adopting the racially-infused language of the increasingly influential ‘Aryan Philology’. Despite this, however, the accomplishments of Thorpe’s edition are considerable: it provided the most comprehensive collection of legal materials available to that point; though its texts are less reliable than those of Schmid’s 1858 reissue, it nonetheless marks a significant advance on its English predecessors; it offers the first modern edition of the Institutes of Polity, a title invented by Thorpe; and most importantly, it provides the first modern English translations of the laws, making them available to a non-philological readership. As is the case with Schmid’s edition, Thorpe’s Ancient Laws is very much touched by the cultural and racial perspectives of the time, but – again like Schmid – it approaches its subject with a distinct and well-developed editorial methodology that marks it as more reliable and authoritative than those editions intended primarily to legitimise the English Reformation. In this sense, Thorpe’s and Schmid’s volumes must be considered the first modern editions of early English law. Although neither of these editors recognised the important role played by Wulfstan in the history of pre-Conquest law-making, the various ideological perspectives they bring to early English legislation shaped modern understanding of his works and contributed to our conception of him as a writer. Even after Wulfstan’s authorship had been recognised, the treatment of his legal works in their earliest editions continued to shape the ways in which they were edited and interpreted. The origins of the modern editorial view of Polity as a unified text, the impression of Æthelred’s and Cnut’s laws as less effective than those of Æthelbert or Alfred, even the treatment of non-legislative texts such as the Compilation on Status or the Laws of Edward and Guthrum as enforceable law all reflect the perspectives and approaches of these early editions. If the impress of Wulfstan’s personality had not yet been recognised, the foundations of the modern view of him as a legislator and politician had nonetheless been laid.

The first step towards recognising the full range of Wulfstan’s activities as an ecclesiastic, social theorist, and lawmaker was taken by the German scholar Felix Liebermann, whose magisterial, three-volume Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903–1916) remains among the greatest editorial accomplishments in the history of early English studies. ⁹⁶ In compiling the Gesetze, Liebermann’s goal was to produce as comprehensive an edition as possible of English law before Magna Carta. To do so, he consulted more than 180 manuscripts in more than eighty archives, a degree of research dwarfing that carried out by Schmid or Thorpe, much less Lambarde or Wilkins. The first volume includes the texts, translations (into German) and textual notes in a multi-columnar format that the great legal historian Frederic William Maitland compared to ‘the full score of an opera’. ⁹⁷ The second volume consists of a comprehensive glossary to the laws while the third contains Liebermann’s extensive explanatory notes. Liebermann was very much the heir of both Schmid and the Historische Rechtsschule, though the extent of his research and careful understanding of the relationships between texts enabled him to expand the scope of the former and escape the overly-rigid structuralism of the latter. As an entry in the history of Wulfstan scholarship, Liebermann’s edition is notable for its authoritative editions of the Laws of Edward and Guthrum, V–X Æthelred, I–II Cnut and Cnut 1020. Although many of his conclusions have subsequently been challenged and his treatment of these texts suffers from a number of serious errors – incorrect chronologies, the assumption that Edward-Guthrum held legal force and the failure to recognise Cnut 1018 as an independent law code – his edition is the first to recognise the significance and complexity of Wulfstan’s legal writings. At the same time, his failure to name Wulfstan as drafter of these codes led historians to largely ignore the archbishop’s influence on the development of early English law for the majority of the twentieth century. ⁹⁸ Yet Liebermann’s reluctance to attribute the laws to Wulfstan is not the same as failing to recognise his role in their composition. Unlike previous editors, Liebermann had the benefit of Napier’s Sammlung, in which a recognition of Wulfstan’s prose style played a central role in the editorial process. Napier’s scrupulous scholarship enabled Liebermann to recognise the distinct similarities between Wulfstan’s homilies and the rhetorical style of the legislation of Æthelred and Cnut, which he comments upon in the notes to those texts. ⁹⁹ Liebermann’s intellectual conservatism as an editor made him reluctant to take his observations any further – he feared departing too far from the conclusions reached by Schmid fifty years earlier, particularly the latter’s dating of Cnut’s laws to after Wulfstan’s death – but he was the first to recognise the traces of Wulfstan’s influence on the legislation of the eleventh century. Building on this recognition, he was also the first to identify Wulfstan as the author of the Institutes of Polity. ¹⁰⁰ Accordingly, while the recognition of Wulfstan’s dual career as ecclesiastic and legislator is often attributed to later scholars, Liebermann nonetheless deserves credit for being the first to recognise that the prolific homilist took part in legal composition as well.

The scholarship of Napier and Liebermann served as the prologue to what Wormald called ‘the Wulfstan Revolution’ of the mid-twentieth century. It was during this period that Wulfstan’s canon evolved into roughly the shape it holds today, and during this period also that the full scope of Wulfstan’s career was finally realised. Credit for these developments belongs primarily to three scholars: from England, Dorothy Whitelock; from Switzerland, Karl Jost; and from the United States, Dorothy Bethurum. Their work gave rise to the many different versions of the archbishop that populate modern scholarship. Although she did not begin the reappraisal of Wulfstan’s career – the first steps were taken by Jost in a series of articles published from 1918 onwards – the scholarship of Dorothy Whitelock gave shape to the project of recuperation and marked its most significant advances. ¹⁰¹ To quote the title of one of her most influential articles, Whitelock was the first to recognise Wulfstan’s dual career as ‘homilist and statesman’, that is, as an ecclesiastic no less involved in the governance of the kingdom than in the moral obligations of his pastorate. ¹⁰² Whitelock grounded her work in the analysis of Wulfstan’s prose style, describing it as ‘a forcible, trenchant style, preeminently suited for preaching’. ¹⁰³ Her detailed understanding of the features characterising Wulfstan’s writing enabled her to identify him as the author of a wide range of legal texts, most importantly the Laws of Edward and Guthrum, V–X Æthelred and I–II Cnut. ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, her success in determining these attributions led her to produce still-authoritative editions and translations of many of Wulfstan’s legal and ecclesiastical works in the two great anthologies of Anglo-Saxon texts produced towards the end of her career. ¹⁰⁵ Significantly, her understanding of Wulfstan’s style as ‘preeminently suited for preaching’ led her to characterise these texts as primarily homiletic. Edward-Guthrum, to cite just one example, uses language ‘completely alien’ to traditional legislation. ¹⁰⁶ For Whitelock, Wulfstan’s homiletic works are ‘the starting point for any real knowledge of his work or its significance’. ¹⁰⁷ This emphasis on Wulfstan the homilist serves as the foundation for her view of both his career and personality. She speculates, for instance, that it was his skill as an eschatological preacher led to his appointment as bishop of London, a claim that has recently been challenged. ¹⁰⁸ Tellingly, she also accepts, though with reservation, the assessment of his character in the Liber Eliensis: ‘by them (the kings, Ethelred, Edmund and Cnut), he was loved as a brother and honoured as a father, and frequently summoned to the highest affairs of the realm, as being the most learned of counsellors, in whom spoke the very wisdom of God, as if in some spiritual temple’. ¹⁰⁹ In other words, to the degree that Wulfstan may be said to have followed a political career, his core identity as a homilist and pastor led him to function primarily as a moral guide to the kings he served. Although there is little reason to believe that he served in any sort of mentorship capacity for Edmund or Cnut – indeed, it is likely that his relationship with them was considerably chillier than it had been with Æthelred – Whitelock’s assessment of his career treats as ‘not entirely without basis’ the rosy picture of the archbishop as a royal brother and father whose words were viewed as ‘the very wisdom of God’. ¹¹⁰ Passages of this sort indicate the degree to which her view of Wulfstan’s style provides, not only the foundation for her construction of his canon, but also her construction of the person behind it. It would be a mistake to view this as a blind spot or sign of unconscious bias: rather, it illustrates the degree to which recuperating the canon of a little-known author inevitably entails fashioning him a textual identity as a way of investing both the individual and his works with form and coherence.

Karl Jost, whose first publications on Wulfstan preceded Whitelock’s by over a decade, left Wulfstan scholarship a more complex legacy. The ‘Wulfstan Revolution’ can properly be said to have begun with Jost’s 1932 article, ‘Einige Wulfstantexte und ihre Quellen’, in which he identified the shared set of sources upon which Wulfstan relied and demonstrated the impossibility of these sources being used in the same way by a ‘Wulfstan-Imitator’. ¹¹¹ Jost also was the first to recognise Wulfstan’s authorship of the poems in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. ¹¹² More controversial – though no less important – was his edition of the Institutes of Polity, the first to treat the text as a single coherent work. Brilliant as the volume is, scholars have raised a number of questions regarding Jost’s editorial decisions. Particularly provocative was his choice to render several of Polity’s chapters in verse based on the pattern of two-stress phrases. Also subject to debate have been his decisions concerning which of the many short passages in the Polity manuscripts should be considered components of the text. More importantly, to create his edition Jost pasted together passages from Polity’s various surviving versions to assemble what he viewed as the authentic text, with fully reconstructed contents and chapter order; however, despite Jost’s claims of authenticity, the resulting archetype appears nowhere in any of Polity’s surviving manuscripts. Some scholars have taken this argument even further to suggest that the constructed nature of Jost’s version, along with the treatment of the text’s chapters by its previous editors, conceals the fact that the text we know as Polity may not even exist. Instead, the ‘Institutes of Polity’ is the product of a history of editorial interventions that remade a collection of semi-independent essays into a deceptively coherent theory of social organisation. Taken together, these critiques are all founded on the same question: where to draw the line between Wulfstan and Jost, and by extension, to what degree is Polity’s author merely a projection of his editor. Similar questions have been raised regarding Jost’s book Wulfstanstudien, one of the few monographs to focus solely on the archbishop. ¹¹³ Picking up on arguments in his ‘Einige Wulfstantexte’ article, Jost provides what at the time was the most complete account of Wulfstan’s style along with his own reconstruction of Wulfstan’s canon. ¹¹⁴ Here also several of Jost’s claims have proved controversial, most significantly his rejection of Whitelock’s assertion that Wulfstan authored the law codes of Cnut. ¹¹⁵ Jost’s argument is in error (as Whitelock herself conclusively demonstrated), yet it raises questions concerning his methodology. In particular, given his comprehensive account of Wulfstan’s style and claim that stylistic contiguity is an inerrant indicator of his authorship, it is surprising that he overlooked the Wulfstanisms that permeate I–II Cnut. Moreover, his dismissal of the manifestly Wulfstanian Cnut 1018 as ‘d[ie] pedantischen Spielerei eines Kompilators’ seems inconsistent with his argument that Wulfstan’s distinctive style cannot be replicated by a hypothesised ‘imitator’. ¹¹⁶ Arguably, the principal reason for the contradictions in Jost’s work lies in the philological tradition within which he was trained. The goal of producing an ‘authentic’ text, the privileging of poetry over prose, the emphasis on textual unity, the comprehensive cataloguing of prose style and the tendency to treat that catalogue in a rigid (some would argue overly rigid) fashion all reflect common priorities of Germanic philology in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In contrast to the moral guide conjured by Whitelock, Jost’s Wulfstan is a strict rhetorician who adhered religiously to a limited set of stylistic practices. He is less a politician or a pastor than a philosopher whose writings reveal a comprehensive and unified view of an ordered polity.

Despite her many contributions to Wulfstan scholarship, Dorothy Bethurum has often been treated as a lesser scholar than her contemporaries. Seen as neither as gifted a historian as Whitelock nor as skilled a philologist as Jost, her work has been dismissed by later scholars as unreliable and poorly executed. This judgement is unfair. It might better be said that Bethurum, much like Jost, worked in accordance with the highest standards of her day which, though subsequently deemed obsolete, nonetheless made possible considerable strides in our understanding of Wulfstan’s life and career. To Bethurum may be attributed the realisation that the manuscripts classified as episcopal ‘Commonplace Books’ were Wulfstanian productions, the recognition of Wulfstan’s authorship of the so-called ‘Compilation on Status’, as well as the brilliant 1971 article ‘Regnum and Sacerdotium in the Early Eleventh Century’, in which she extended arguments first set forth in Whitelock’s ‘Homilist and Statesman’ essay in light of subsequent scholarship. ¹¹⁷ More broadly, she also published the first authoritative study of Old English legislative prose, which remains a touchstone for studies of the stylistic features of pre-Conquest law. ¹¹⁸ Bethurum’s greatest contribution – and the one for which she has received the most criticism – is her edition of Wulfstan’s homilies. ¹¹⁹ Intended to succeed Napier’s edition, Bethurum edits only those texts securely attributable to Wulfstan and provides a lengthy introduction along with detailed explanatory notes and apparatus criticus. Like Jost in Polity, Bethurum attempted to produce the most authentic version of each homily, a goal that led her to stray farther from the manuscripts than did Napier. At the same time, she went further in demonstrating connections between passages that Napier treated only as individual texts. She also set her edition within a scholarly framework that remains the foundation of subsequent studies of Wulfstan’s homiletic corpus. However, for later scholars, the problems with her edition are redolent of those afflicting Jost’s Institutes of Polity: her critics have argued that her attempts to produce the ‘best’ text only resulted in false editorial confections; that she was overly aggressive in altering or emending her texts; that she misrepresented manuscript readings; that her decisions regarding what constituted a homily were capricious; her thematic organisation was artificial; and that both her texts and her portrait of their author were more a projection of her own ideas than one firmly grounded in the evidence. ¹²⁰ To a degree, these criticisms are not without foundation. Her manuscript readings do contain errors to a greater degree than did Napier’s, several of her texts do suffer from overmuch editorial intervention, and her decision to exclude certain texts (especially homilies based on law codes) is unfortunate. One might observe, however, that many of her choices reflect common editorial practice at the time and that her attempts to produce the ‘best texts’ of the homilies were largely founded on solid manuscript evidence. In short, Bethurum’s edition is very much of its day – both in its qualities and its shortcomings – but its limitations hardly overwhelm its considerable value and usefulness. Within this context, it should be noted that much of the criticism of Bethurum is framed in a much harsher tone than that levelled at her contemporaries, a reflection of the misogyny and snobbishness too often directed at female scholars of a humbler academic pedigree (Bethurum graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent her career at Connecticut College, a small women’s liberal arts school). ¹²¹ Nonetheless, Bethurum’s research, mentorship and service to the field made her a pioneer for subsequent female scholars, even if appropriate credit for her accomplishments has all too often eluded her.

Although Whitelock, Jost and Bethurum were the leading figures in recuperating Wulfstan’s works for modern scholarship, it would be a mistake to overlook both the criticism their work attracted as well as the other scholars who may not have dedicated as much of their career to the archbishop but still made significant contributions to the study of his works. Without question, the most voluble critic of the resurrected Wulfstan was the outspoken art historian Christopher Hohler, who was unconvinced that the author of the Canons of Edgar could have been as learned as he had been portrayed by earlier scholars, otherwise why the need to ask Abbot Ælfric the about the ‘not very recondite’ material in his Pastoral Letters. Moreover, he argued, ‘it is definitely shocking that, when they arrived in Latin, he should have had to send them back to get them translated’. ¹²² He was equally unconvinced by the archbishop’s expanding canon, finding it unlikely that the texts attributed to him could have been produced by someone whose life ‘must have been spent, not in a library, but in a saddle’. Rather, Hohler suggests, ‘he could easily have whiled away the time on horseback putting into rhythmic prose matter fed to him by his secretary’. ¹²³ While Hohler’s arguments have not been borne out by subsequent scholarship, they are notable for being based on a hypothetical authorial identity for Wulfstan resting largely on conclusions drawn from his writing style – a methodology strikingly similar to that used by those scholars supporting a more expansive view of the archbishop’s career. For Hohler, Wulfstan’s apparent need to rely on the vernacular and composition of relatively ornamental rhythmic prose, especially when paired with his likely peripatetic lifestyle, produce a picture of an unlearned ecclesiastic more skilled at dressing up the work of others than of generating original ideas of his own. In short, though his conclusions may have been different, the thought processes underlying Hohler’s assessment of Wulfstan were very much of a piece with those of his contemporaries and predecessors. Against Hohler’s dismissal of Wulfstan one must place the scholarly achievements of Kenneth Sisam and N. R. Ker. Sisam’s most significant contributions to Wulfstan studies came in the form of two brief notes. In the first case, he revisits the dispute between Jost and Whitelock concerning the relationship between the Latin and Old English renditions of the law code VI Æthelred, concluding plausibly that the latter version was an adaptation of the earlier, which expanded upon its provisions for use by parish priests. ¹²⁴ More importantly, it was Sisam who conclusively demonstrated that many of the texts used by Lambarde in producing the Archiaonomia were not taken from a now-lost manuscript but were instead the result of a linguistic experiment by Lawrence Nowell in which he translated Old English texts into Latin and then retranslated them into Old English. ¹²⁵ The importance of Sisam’s realisation should not be underestimated: even the great Liebermann, despite considerable reservations, printed Lambardeʼs texts as if they were authentic recoveries of a lost medieval original. Sisam’s work thus made possible the production of more accurate editions of Wulfstan’s legal writings, even if the potential for such editions have not yet been entirely fulfilled. Ker’s discoveries were, if anything, even more influential: second only to Wanley in his comprehensive understanding of pre-Conquest English manuscripts, Ker demonstrated in a study of the Worcester-produced Hemming’s Cartulary that the hand of a particular annotator was most likely that of Wulfstan himself. Ker expanded on this conclusion in a subsequent article, in which he identified examples of the ‘Wulfstan hand’ in other manuscripts associated with the archbishop. ¹²⁶ Ker’s discovery shed unprecedented light on Wulfstan’s compositional strategies, reading habits and manuscript usage. It revealed a close involvement with the contents and organisation of manuscripts produced by scribes in his service, as well as a persistent tendency to correct, revise and adapt his own writings. Although Ker, with typical restraint, refrained from drawing any overly ambitious conclusions regarding Wulfstan’s working habits or character, his work has served as the foundation for all later attempts to understand the evolution of the archbishop’s works and his identity as an author.

The most influential scholar of the next generation – and the scholar whose works have had the greatest impact on the modern study of Wulfstan – is the historian Patrick Wormald. Wormald transformed the study of early medieval English law by revealing in it a depth, complexity and sophistication largely overlooked by previous scholars, including the father of English legal history, Frederic William Maitland. ¹²⁷ Wormald’s scholarship covered virtually all aspects of early English law and legal practice, though he was especially fascinated with the reigns of Alfred, Æthelred and Cnut, the kings responsible for issuing the most innovative and ambitious legislation of the pre-Conquest period. In so doing, Wormald aimed to reverse the tendency among medieval legal historians to overlook or dismiss Old English law as primitive or largely irrelevant to what came after. Additionally, in rewriting the history of early English legislation, he sought to demonstrate the early coalescence and centralisation of the Anglo-Saxon state. Along with James Campbell, Wormald endorsed a ‘maximalist’ view of early English politics according to which an effective, kingdom-wide system of royal administration and legal enforcement developed far earlier than hitherto recognised. ¹²⁸ As both the most prolific lawmaker and influential political theorist of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Wulfstan occupied a central place in both of these projects. According to Wormald, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan brought to the language of law-making the sermonizing approach that was already his acknowledged specialty’. Consequently, Wormald continues, ‘it is possible and may be advisable to view his work from a unitary perspective […] Eschatological moralist, codifier of canons, social idealist, engineer of a reformed regime: Wulfstan was all of these things, not just successively but to an extent concurrently’. ¹²⁹ Wormald argued that Wulfstan’s writings, both legal and homiletic, were suffused with a far-reaching vision of a ‘Holy Society’, one dedicated to Christian virtue and ordered according to divine principles. ¹³⁰ Wormald’s sense that Wulfstan understood the various aspects of his vocation to be complementary and guided by the same political agenda enabled him to develop the most comprehensive account of the archbishop’s career since Whitelock first proposed that he be understood as both homilist and statesman. Not only did he establish the extent of Wulfstan’s influence at the courts of Æthelred and Cnut, but he also demonstrated his significance as a political and social theorist. ¹³¹ From a historiographical standpoint, it should be noted that, ground-breaking as Wormald’s vision of Wulfstan may be, it nonetheless rests on the same foundation as those of his predecessors: though lacking much interest in stylistics, Wormald nonetheless traces the origins of Wulfstan’s unique blend of the legal and spiritual to his ‘sermonizing approach’, a skill that was ‘already his acknowledged specialty’ before he entered the king’s orbit. ¹³² Yet Wormald’s portrayal of Wulfstan is very much driven by his own priorities. Highlighting the lawmaker over the ecclesiastic allows Wormald to harden Wulfstan’s character: unlike the benign spiritual guide of Whitelock, this Wulfstan is primarily a guardian of moral standards who did not prioritise admonition as much as enforcement. Significantly, Wormald emphasises enforcement elsewhere in his scholarship as the principal means by which his centralised pre-Conquest government ensured the loyalty of its subjects and adherence to its laws. ¹³³ For Wormald, Wulfstan was ‘one of the architects of a more enduring ‘empire’ [than that of the Carolingians]: the English state itself’. ¹³⁴ As Wormald writes in one of his final essays on the archbishop, Wulfstan is best understood as an ‘eleventh-century statebuilder’. Wormald is undoubtedly correct about the depth, complexity and utopic overtones of Wulfstan’s social vision, yet it is difficult not to see how much his characterisation of the archbishop owes to his scholarly agenda. It is interesting to observe, though, that in developing this particular view of Wulfstan, Wormald has, in effect, reversed that of Whitelock: it is now the statesman, not the homilist, who takes priority.

The scholarly advances of the mid- and late twentieth century have given rise to what might justifiably be referred to as a golden age of Wulfstan scholarship. Over the past forty years, Wulfstan has been studied by more scholars from more perspectives than at any time since Parker published the De antiquitate in 1572, yet stylistic (often joined with linguistic) analysis remains foundational to our understanding of his works and career. Thanks to the work of Andy Orchard, Jonathan Wilcox, Mary Clayton, Alan Kennedy, Thomas Hall, Don Scragg, Joyce Tally Lionarons, among others, stylistic analysis continues to be used to broaden or refine Wulfstan’s canon. Their recognition of hitherto unnoticed signs of authorship has resulted in the addition of the Promissio regis, among others, to his list of probable works, as well as a better understanding of non-Wulfstanian texts with which the archbishop had been connected, such as Napier homilies XL, XLII and XXX. ¹³⁵ Other texts have been removed from Wulfstan’s canon or, at the very least, swept to its margins, including the Northumbrian Priests’ Law and the compound legal tract Rectitudines singularum personarum and Gerefa. ¹³⁶ It has also enabled us to develop more accurate editions of such texts as the Sermo ad populum, Wulfstan’s Latin homilies, his canon law collection and the law code Cnut 1018, while also helping us develop a better understanding of the relationship between different components of the Institutes of Polity. ¹³⁷ Wilcox’s analysis of remnants of Wulfstan’s style in twelfth-century anonymous homilies has shed light on the post-Conquest dissemination of his works, while the Japanese scholar Hiroshi Ogawa employed similar methods to try to resurrect the ‘Wulfstan Imitator’, so effectively dismissed by Jost. ¹³⁸ Richard Dance has used stylistic and linguistic factors to demonstrate that Wulfstan could not have been educated at the Winchester school of Bishop Æthelwold, a brilliant piece of scholarship that, sadly, finally disproves the attractive (if never entirely convincing) theory that Wulfstan and Ælfric had begun their careers as classmates. ¹³⁹ Most controversially, competing analyses of Wulfstan’s prose have led to debates regarding the order in which the three surviving versions of the Sermo lupi had been composed. ¹⁴⁰ More narrow studies of individual stylistic features such as Wulfstan’s use of echoic and nominal compounds, paired opposites and internal rhyme and alliteration have provided new insights into his compositional process and the ways in which he used the form of his prose to advance his theological and political interests. Particularly influential has been the broader approach adopted by M. K. Lawson, who demonstrated the extent of both the stylistic and ideological interpenetration between Wulfstan’s homiletic and legal writings. ¹⁴¹ Equally important has been the ground-breaking work of Sara Pons-Sanz: in a series of studies characterised by enviable linguistic expertise along with an exceptional eye for detail she has provided a plausible chronology of Wulfstan’s works, demonstrated the possible role his works played in the integration of Old Norse speakers into English society and shown that his innovative use of Scandinavian loanwords was likely a self-conscious strategy to promote his ideological interests rather than the unintended consequence of his occupation of a northern diocese. In addition, her analysis of the poems attributed to Wulfstan in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle urges caution in over-reliance on potentially ambiguous stylistic evidence when proposing new Wulfstanian attributions. ¹⁴² Perhaps the most exciting work of this sort is currently being carried out by the European Research Council-funded project, the Electronic Corpus of Homilies in Old English (ECHOE), directed by Winfried Rudolf and Susan Irvine with the assistance of Thomas Hall. By digitising the corpus of Old English sermonic texts and using ultraviolet illumination to re-examine pre-Conquest homiletic manuscripts (including those in the ‘Commonplace Book’ tradition), they have not only developed the tools for a more comprehensive catalogue of the ‘Wulfstan style’ but they have also discovered both new texts by the archbishop and new examples of Wulfstan’s handwriting. Once completed, the ECHOE project has the potential to illuminate Wulfstan’s canon, prose style and compositional practices in entirely new ways. The value of multispectral imaging analysis has also been illustrated by Wilcox, whose recently published study of London, British Library, Additional 38651 revealed previously hidden annotations in Wulfstan’s own hand. ¹⁴³

The many advances in scholarship in these areas has led to a re-examination of Wulfstan’s political, legal and religious views, especially their relationship to the reformist movement of the generation previously. Joyce Hill, Christopher A. Jones, Eric Stanley, Malcolm Godden and Julia Barrow have all examined the ways in which the legacy of the first-generation reformers left its mark on Wulfstan’s thought, particularly his views of kingship and the relationship between crown and Church. ¹⁴⁴ The underlying suspicion of unchecked royal power in both his and Ælfric’s works points to the degree to which they had absorbed reformist theology, but also the manner in which their views had been affected by the dramatic collapse of the crown’s support for the reformers’ agenda during the 970s and 980s. Perhaps the most significant consequence of the troubled relationship between rex and ecclesia was the powerful emphasis Wulfstan placed on the obligation of the bishop to serve as the conscience of the kingdom, at times bearing a greater responsibility for its welfare than the king himself. This complex relationship with the crown has been a central theme in recent studies touching on Wulfstan’s sometimes fraught relations with Æthelred, Cnut and pre-Conquest England’s secular aristocracy. Influenced especially by the work of Dorothy Whitelock, important recent studies by Simon Keynes, Catherine Cubitt, Pauline Stafford, Levi Roach and Ann Williams, have shed light on the many facets of Wulfstan’s place at the royal court as advisor, advocate, factionalist, politician and as a leading figure on the king’s witan. ¹⁴⁵ As these scholars have shown, Wulfstan’s place at court was never simple, obvious, or unproblematic. His influence fluctuated as did his relationships with the kings he served. Of equal interest has been the influence of reformist theology on his religious and homiletic writings, a topic explored by Milton McC. Gatch, Nicholas Howe, Joyce Tally Lionarons, Alice Cowen and Clare Lees. ¹⁴⁶ As the work of these scholars has shown, running through Wulfstan’s homiletic writings is a tension between religious orthodoxy and the unprecedented demands of contemporary historical circumstance, or to borrow a phrase frequently used to characterise the homilies, between tradition and innovation. Much of this scholarship has been made possible by new attention to Wulfstan’s sources by such scholars as Malcolm Godden, Eric Stanley, James Cross, Rolf Bremmer, Thomas Hill, Michael Elliott, Thomas Hall and Andy Orchard, all of whom have demonstrated the degree to which Wulfstan relied on authors of the Carolingian reform, including Hincmar of Rheims, Alcuin, Chrodegang of Metz, Ghaerbald of Liège and Adso of Montier-en-Der, among others. ¹⁴⁷ Wulfstan did not merely imitate the views of Frankish writers; rather, he used them as authorities to adapt, revise and depart from as his religious and political views required. Recognising this tension between orthodoxy and originality has made it possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of the penitential and eschatological themes so prominent in many of Wulfstan’s writings: for Wulfstan, references to the eschaton are neither simple scare tactics nor projections of his own (and society’s) fear of the end times. Rather, reminding his audience of the imminence of the final judgement – even after the year 1000 had come and gone – served as a means of imposing an ethical demand on his hearers, a reminder of the urgent need for repentance and reform. ¹⁴⁸ These were not merely ideological matters for Wulfstan: recent work by Stephen Baxter and Christopher Norton has demonstrated the degree to which his theological perspective and views of pastoral leadership informed his approach to the practical matters of ecclesiastical administration. ¹⁴⁹ Far from the corrupt, reprobate bishop described by William of Malmesbury and his contemporaries in the twelfth century, Wulfstan seems to have been a careful manager with a keen sense of York’s and Worcester’s foundational prerogatives and an aggressive approach to defending their interests. This increasingly sophisticated understanding of Wulfstan’s homiletic writings and practice of ecclesiastical administration has been paired with a growing appreciation for his so-called ‘Commonplace’ manuscripts. More than simply random assemblages of unconnected texts, Hans Sauer, Michael Elliott, James Cross, Gareth Mann, T. A. Heslop and Christopher A. Jones have shown that the manuscripts compiled under Wulfstan’s direction exhibit evidence of careful thought regarding their contents and organisation. ¹⁵⁰ Building on N. R. Ker’s identification of the ‘Wulfstan Hand’ as well as recent advances in codicology and palaeography, they have revealed both Wulfstan’s close supervision over their production and the ways in which their compilation points to the possible ways in which he used them.

Arguably, the most significant development in Wulfstan studies over the past few decades has been our greater understanding of his work as a legislator. The work of Patrick Wormald has made it possible to better integrate Wulfstan’s legal writings into the remainder of his corpus, while the connections he drew between the various facets of the archbishop’s thought and the predominant theme of a Holy Society has enabled us to recognise in his writing not a disparate jumble of undeveloped ideas, but a fully fleshed-out theory of legal authority and social organisation. ¹⁵¹ Scholars such as Mary Richards, Pauline Stafford, John Hudson and Tom Lambert have followed Wormald in restoring Wulfstan to his rightful place in the history of pre-Conquest law. ¹⁵² Although Dorothy Whitelock first demonstrated Wulfstan’s authorial hand in the legislation of Æthelred and Cnut in the 1940s, subsequent histories of Old English law largely omitted any mention of his involvement. ¹⁵³ Not until the work of historians such as Wormald, Richards, Stafford and Lambert was Wulfstan’s influence on both law-making and the exercise of legal authority finally recognised. Modern understanding of Wulfstan’s participation in legislative councils has benefited particularly from recent biographies of the kings he served. ¹⁵⁴ More local studies on individual law codes by Richards, Lambert, Simon Keynes, Catherine Cubitt, Jay Gates, Stefan Jurasinski, Levi Roach, Paul Hyams, Mary Richards, Nicole Marafioti, Simon C. Thomson and Alan Kennedy have also shed light on the historical and textual circumstances in which Wulfstan’s royal legislation was produced. ¹⁵⁵ In particular, these studies have demonstrated that what earlier scholars treated as chaotic, ineffective and amateurish pseudo-law was in reality carefully constructed to respond to the immediate needs of the king, the Church and Wulfstan himself, both for the purpose of social control and for the expression of legal authority via written text, reference to social norms, homily, multilingual circulation, clerical adaptation and aristocratic enforcement. The concepts underlying Wulfstan’s legislation, particularly as expressed in the Institutes of Polity, have been the subject of special scrutiny, whether Timothy Powell’s and Inka Moilanen’s studies of the ‘Three Orders’ trope, Marafioti’s discussion of Wulfstan’s understanding of secular and ecclesiastical justice, Gates’ consideration of how the Laws of Edward and Guthrum fit into Wulfstan’s larger views on episcopal reform, or Cubitt’s analysis of the archbishop’s condemnation of political and religious hypocrisy. ¹⁵⁶ Moreover, as Bruce O’Brien and Jonathan Wilcox have demonstrated, the influence of Wulfstan’s legal and political writings did not end with the Conquest; rather, their influence persisted well into the new Anglo-Norman regime. ¹⁵⁷

It is impossible to fully summarise the range of scholarship on Wulfstan (and, as always, it is incumbent upon the author to apologise to those omitted), but several broad conclusions can be drawn. First, the proliferation of methodologies and perspectives used to approach Wulfstan’s work echoes the similar diversification of critical practices in the field of pre-Conquest studies as a whole. Second, even scholarship that seems most distant from the writings of Lambarde, Parker and Wanley – or, for that matter, Whitelock, Jost and Bethurum – must nonetheless be understood within the context of their work. Even if unacknowledged, modern views of Wulfstan have been defined by earlier scholarship on his career, writings and, most especially, the unique prose style upon which our understanding of his corpus rests. Finally, considering the field’s complicated history, it would be naïve, not to mention reductive, to speak of only one ‘Wulfstan’. Even grounded in historical fact, the diverse nature of his writings and the diverse perspectives of those studying him mean that any ‘Wulfstan’ is a construct resulting, at least in part, from evidentiary selection bias, the editorial perspective lying behind even the most authoritative editions of his works and the desires, biases and methodological commitments of the scholar himself. This is not to devalue or criticise the past four centuries of scholarship on Wulfstan; it is to caution that any claim that a particular version of Wulfstan is ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ should be treated with suspicion. The question remains, however, of how these conclusions should affect the future progress of Wulfstan studies. It is hardly desirable or productive to simply throw up one’s hands in postmodern despair at the impossibility of ever tunnelling back through history to discover the ‘real’ Wulfstan. Rather, we must consider how to take this history of scholarship into account going forward.

III

In looking ahead to the future of Wulfstan studies, several points must be acknowledged at the outset:

• • Any attempt to recover a fixed or final version of a Wulfstan text – and, by extension, a stable identity for its author – will inevitably be trapped, on the one hand, between the emphasis in modern media (print and digital) on textual singularity and authenticity, and on the other, the inescapable multiplicity of texts composed, copied and circulated in a manuscript culture. ¹⁵⁸

• • Scholarly editions, even the more fluid variety made possible by digital technology, are unavoidably defined by the priorities, methodological decisions and interventions of the editor. This is the case even (perhaps especially) when the editor attempts to absent themselves from the edition as completely as possible. ¹⁵⁹

• • Especially in the case of an author such as Wulfstan, for whom the absence of biographical evidence requires him to be known primarily through his writings, the scholar’s understanding of his works reflects judgements – often unacknowledged – based on his style of writing and assumptions – often equally unacknowledged – regarding his character and personality. ‘Wulfstan’ is as much the product of those who study him as he is their subject. ¹⁶⁰

• • Bearing the claims above in mind, it may be best to understand the critical edition and the scholarly study as more similar than often acknowledged. Neither should be viewed as an absolute, objective, or final treatment of a given text or texts. Nor should it prize deceptive claims of singular authenticity or truth, particularly in light of the previous points. This does not mean that they should be viewed as exercises in radical subjectivity or contingency! Nor should this be taken to undermine or negate the authority of the project, the legitimacy of its conclusions or the expertise of its author. Rather, edition and study should both be viewed as an attempt to address a set of significant historical or interpretive questions regarding the texts under consideration. The nature of these questions defines the project’s form and methodology. Its value lies in its generative capacity, that is, its potential to produce a clearer, more revealing, or more provocative understanding of its object(s) – not just answers, but better questions. In each case, the goal is progress, not finality; forward motion, not interpretive stasis. ¹⁶¹

To gather some sense of how these claims might be used in the future study of Wulfstan’s works, it may be helpful to use one of his lesser-known homilies, Napier XXXV (Be mistlican gelimpan ‘On various misfortunes’) as a brief case study. ¹⁶² Surviving in CCCC 201 and British Library, Hatton 113, the text is a homiletic rendering of the law codes VII and VIIa Æthelred, a penitential edict issued in 1009 ‘ða se micele here com to lande’. ¹⁶³ Appearing to consist of an awkward mixture of Wulfstanian prose and non-Wulfstanian interpolations, the text has been edited only once and the inconsistencies of its style have left it on the margins of Wulfstan’s corpus. As a result of its eccentricities, previous scholars have assumed the text to be either an authentic Wulfstanian homily unfortunately interfered with by a reviser with more enthusiasm than skill, or the work of a different writer entirely. ¹⁶⁴ Though it would be impossible to resolve this question in such a short space, Napier XXXV provides a useful means to briefly explore how the points discussed above might influence the study of Wulfstan and his works.

To begin with, any discussion of Napier XXXV must start by addressing its idiosyncratic style. Although Napier made a point of interfering as little as possible with his texts, he states at the outset of his edition his intention to bracket those phrases in homilies attributed to Wulfstan that he believed to have been interpolated by a later reviser; however, the only text in which such brackets appear is homily XXXV, in which they are used extensively. ¹⁶⁵ To cite one passage towards the end of the homily:

And ealle godes þeowas [don, swa hit neod is,] mid sealmsangum þingjan georne [for ealle þas þeode and æt ælcum tidsange aþenedum limum sumne sealmsingan preces and collecta and geornlice biddan are and miltse ealre þysse þeode,] and godes þearfan [myngje man gelome, þæt hy eac to Criste clypjan swyðe georne and] anrædlice gebiddan for đa, þe heom god don, and ælces mannes þeowetlingas [ealle] þa ðry dagas[, þe þæt fæsten aboden sy,] weorces beon gefreode wiđ cyricsocne and wiđ þam, þe hy þæt fæsten þe lustlicor gefæsten and wyrcan heom sylfum þæt, þæt hy willan [and clypjan to Criste eac swyðe georne]. ¹⁶⁶

Napier’s judgement concerning those phrases which are and are not Wulfstan’s is telling. Perhaps most surprising is his bracketing of phrases that were recognisably Wulfstanian even in the late nineteenth century, such as don swa hit neod is or and clypjan to Criste eac swyðe georne. Likewise unclear are his reasons for bracketing certain, seemingly innocuous, words, such as the ealle between þeowetlingas and þa ðry dagas. Tellingly, Napier also brackets such phrases as for ealle þas þeode and æt ælcum tidsange aþenedum limum sumne sealmsingan preces and collecta and geornlice biddan are and miltse ealre þysse þeode, an adaptation of VIIa Æthelred 6.3: ‘And æt ælcan tidsange eal hired aþenedum limum ætforan Godes weofode singe þone sealm: “Domine, quid multiplicati sunt”, and preces and collecta’. ¹⁶⁷ Though Napier did not know of Wulfstan’s authorship of VII and VIIa Æthelred, the fact that he does not bracket quotations from the laws in texts such as homily L indicates the arbitrariness behind his decisions. In short, though some bracketed phrases in the homily are without analogues elsewhere in Wulfstan’s work, others are very much in his style, while some passages seem to have been disqualified simply because they are less stylistically accomplished than one might expect of the archbishop. Implicit in Napier’s choices are several assumptions regarding the archbishop: first, that a clear line can be drawn between Wulfstanian and non-Wulfstanian language, even at the level of individual syntactical units; that this line can be used to distinguish the ‘true’ Wulfstan from the ‘false’ reviser; that Wulfstan’s style can be graded according to historically contingent notions of elegance; and that the Wulfstan of 1009 was sufficiently mature a writer to avoid the syntactic infelicities that indicate either rhetorical immaturity or simply lesser skill. In part, these assumptions merely reflect the differences in textual scholarship between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, yet the questions raised by Napier’s editorial choices are not so easily dismissed. Even if a modern editor might present Napier XXXV differently, one is nonetheless forced to confront unstated questions concerning textual authenticity, authorial identity and the reliability of seemingly objective stylistic evidence. Put differently, the fundamental question is not what Napier ‘got wrong’, but rather how Napier’s choices shed light on unresolved methodological and interpretive issues at the centre of our own editorial practice.

One question raised by Napier’s edition that remains unresolved in modern scholarship regards the potential existence and significance of texts authored by Wulfstan but lacking the traditional features of his prose. That is, how did Wulfstan write when he wasn’t writing like Wulfstan? And how does our understanding of Wulfstan’s canon, ideological commitments and authorial persona change when style ceases to be a reliable means of differentiating his texts from those of other writers? A rare example of Wulfstan writing in a different register can be found in a writ of 1020 addressed to Cnut informing him of Æthelnoth’s consecration as archbishop of Canterbury:

Wulfstan arcebiscop gret Cnut cyning his hlaford 7 Ælfgyfe þa hlæfdian eadmodlice. 7 ic cyþe inc, leof, þæt we habbað gedon swa swa us swutelung fram eow com æt þam biscope Æþelnoþe, þæt we habbað hine nu gebletsod. Nu bidde ic for Godes lufon 7 for eallan Godes halgan þæt ge witan on Gode þa mæþe 7 on þam halgan hade, þæt he mote beon þære þinga wyrþe þe oþre beforan wæron – Dunstan þe god wæs 7 mænig oþer – þæt þes mote beon eall swa rihta 7 gerysna wyrðe. Þæt inc byð bam þearflic for Gode 7 eac gerysenlic for worolde. ¹⁶⁸

The text is generally considered authentic, with its authorship made known in its opening clause. ¹⁶⁹ This aside, however, little within the text is indicative of Wulfstan’s authorship: it lacks the typical characteristics of his style and the diction is indistinguishable from other legal documents. The rhythmic, two-stress phrases, internal rhyme, echoic compounds and paired opposites found elsewhere in the archbishop’s writings are absent here. At the same time, thematic or rhetorical features one might associate with Wulfstan, such as the admonitory tone and emphasis on ecclesiastical prerogatives, are not uncommon in episcopal (or even royal) documents of this sort. ¹⁷⁰ Wulfstan thus appears to be adhering to the rhetorical conventions of Old English administrative prose rather than employing his typical homiletic style. ¹⁷¹ In short, without the opening clause, there is little to indicate Wulfstan’s authorship of this text. Ideologically, it fits comfortably within his thought, but one might easily make the same claim regarding many of his contemporaries. When paired with Napier XXXV, it highlights the problem that particular stylistic qualities may be grounds for assigning a text to Wulfstan, but their absence is not necessarily sufficient evidence that he did not write it. We are thus forced to question whether atypical passages in texts attributed to Wulfstan can be taken as ineluctable signs of later interference or revision. More importantly, we must confront the fact that our treatment of such passages can be less a matter of textual presentation rather than textual production. The ‘author’ of the text changes based on the choices of his editor. Moreover, decisions of this sort subsequently become criteria determining the way in which other texts are attributed, edited and interpreted. Perhaps most importantly, the non-Wulfstanian style of the writ raises the possibility that texts (and the perspectives they express) excluded from Wulfstan’s canon on stylistic grounds may be from his pen after all.

The problems raised by the hypothetical ‘non-Wulfstanian’ Wulfstanian text reflect a fundamental difference between the traditional aims of philological scholarship and the challenges posed by Wulfstan’s works. The goal of philology is the determination of a text’s singular origin, authorised by its attribution to an identifiable (even if potentially unnamed) author. In the words of Bernard Cerquiglini, ‘the name affixed to the page destined for the printer authorizes. If it orders and allows the multiplication of a single fragment of writing by itself, it gives this fragment the status of a text. It equips it with an author, that is, with an origin and an entitlement; it endows it with a canonical form, that is, with a stable conformity’. ¹⁷² No less an authority than Fred Robinson has made a similar observation regarding Old English studies: noting the frequency with which pre-Conquest texts were adapted, revised, or even reattributed by someone other than their original author, he points out that, ‘to the modern reader, with his anxieties over accurate authorial attribution, the whole procedure could seem a little fraudulent’. ¹⁷³ Yet, although Wulfstan’s unique style helps us identify certain texts as his, with the possible exceptions of the sermones lupi he seems not to have viewed a singular authorial voice as central to a text’s authority. Thus, in Napier XXXV, the force of the text does not derive from the fact that it is Wulfstan speaking: the absence of explicit authorial references makes the homily easily transferrable to other preachers for whom first person clauses such as ‘utan don eac swa, swa oft swa þæs neod sy, beode man sona þreora daga fæsten’ ¹⁷⁴ can be spoken as if in their own voice. Indeed, the statement’s power is grounded in its multivocality. Its earliest iterations occur as the second clause of the Latin VII Æthelred (‘Et instituimus, ut omnis Christianus, qui aetatem habet, ieiunet tribus diebus in pane et aqua et herbis crudis’) and the first clause of its Old English translation VIIa Æthelred (‘Nu wille we þæt eal folc to gemænelicre dædbote þrig dagas be hlafe and wirtum and wætere’). ¹⁷⁵ In both instances, the clause’s force derives from its status as a decree of the king, whose use of the first-person plural identifies him as its speaker and the singular authority behind it. In Napier XXXV, however, Wulfstan has exchanged the preacher for the king as the first-person authority whose voice legitimates the text. The text’s power lies in the moral authority of the clerical voice – and, conceivably, the spiritual authority embodied in the collective voice of the Church – rather than the legal voice of the monarch. Wulfstan has thus composed his homily in such a way that the authorial function can be attributed to any of a number of authoritative voices, rather than solely – or even necessarily – his own. The ‘author’ is not ‘Wulfstan’, but a persona generated by the nature of the speaker and the circumstances in which the text is spoken. In this sense, although the specific historical context within which the text was first written remains crucial to our understanding, the emphasis on finding within it an authentic ‘Wulfstan voice’ and dismissing that of hypothetical revisers is to misconstrue it entirely. The point is not to locate the real Wulfstan, but to understand how the text produces multiple Wulfstans, that is, multiple authorial voices to whom it may be attributed.

The multiplicity of voices held in potentia by Napier XXXV serves as a reminder, in the words of Joyce Hill, that ‘modern concepts of authorship and textual integrity are not applicable to the Anglo-Saxon period, even when they appear to be present’. ¹⁷⁶ Yet we may take this point further: in the case of Wulfstan, these ‘modern concepts of authorship and textual integrity’ are an illusion created by the complex interaction between the inherently ambiguous nature of the text with the subjective desires of the scholar. Of the many scholars who have attempted to produce authoritative renditions of Wulfstan’s writings over the past five centuries, Napier most deserves to be recognised as the editor who maintained the greatest fidelity to the archbishop’s manuscripts and who went to the greatest lengths to absent himself from the edition on the page. Nonetheless, as his version of Napier XXXV indicates, even he cannot escape the fact that his texts, and consequently the textual identity of his Wulfstan, are to some degree the product of his scholarly imagination. In more stark terms, the text Napier XXXV does not exist in any historical sense: as printed, it appears in no manuscript and it rests on beliefs concerning textual and authorial identity that would have been unrecognisable to the person who first composed its words. The imposition of brackets defines the identity of the text while generating the illusory presence of a secondary author who may never have existed. Napier’s hypothesised medieval reviser is merely a mask that conceals the fact that the reviser is Napier himself. The attempt to draw clear lines demarcating the real Wulfstan from the false only highlights the impossibility of disentangling the text’s author and editor while emphasising the fundamental ahistoricity of the concept of a ‘true’ author or a ‘pure’ originary text. None of this represents a failure on Napier’s part. Napier XXXV only makes explicit the fact that any editorial project produces a text and author that originate, at least in part, in the imagination of the editor. The recognition of this fact allows Wulfstan scholars to recognise the archbishop’s many, often contradictory, textual identities as artificial constructs, personae fostered by the archbishop himself. Catherine Karkov and George Brown have argued that textual ambiguity serves as ‘a deliberate device designed to make the viewer or reader think about meaning, to deconstruct and reconstruct compositions in order to understand how their structures conveyed meaning’. ¹⁷⁷ So, I propose, should it be with the study of Wulfstan: the search for the true Wulfstan is the search for a single, authoritative figure who is not only illusory, but an illusion we create ourselves. The future of Wulfstan studies lies in the use of our scholarship, editorial and interpretive, to interrogate the persona of the text’s author, and how the text both creates and is created by this author as a means of responding to or shaping historical events, of instilling in its audience a sense of moral obligation, and of using the imaginative and ideological potential of the text to build a Holy Society in a fallen world.

The complex history of Wulfstan studies cannot be reduced to a single scholarly tradition or a continuous progression of discovery. It is grounded in texts of a distinctive prose style, based on which an almost infinite number of conclusions may be drawn. Perhaps more importantly, it is an extended case study in the way in which even the most historically or textually based scholarship is shaped by the beliefs, priorities and personality of the scholar who produced it. In this sense, the development of Wulfstan studies mirrors the development of Old English studies as a whole. Yet to see in its history nothing more than the errors of our intellectual predecessors is not only to denigrate their remarkable achievements as scholars, but also to miss how much their Wulfstans shaped our own, and how our own will shape the Wulfstans to come. We may never recover a ‘true’ Wulfstan, but in recognising his many personae we gain better understanding of how he and his texts interacted with the world around them. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that Wulfstan, like the similarly initialled Walt Whitman, is a writer who might truly be said to contain multitudes.