The Homiletic Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan: A Critical Study by Joyce Tally Lionarons (review)

A potent figure straddling Anglo-Saxon and Danish worlds, as adept in composing homilies as law-codes, Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) strove through his work to shepherd England through troubled times. Along with his contemporary Ælfric of Eynsham, Wulfstan was keenly concerned to instruct laypersons and clergy alike, calling them to righteous ways of living that alone might protect them from judgment—whether meted out by foreign invasion or by the divine hand on the Last Day. While Ælfric’s sources, writings, and influence have received considerable attention in recent years, full-length studies of Wulfstan have been singularly scarce. The standard edition of his works, Dorothy Bethurum’s The Homilies of Wulfstan (1957), represents a decided improvement over Arthur Napier’s work of three-quarters of a century before (Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit [1883]), not least because the latter includes sermons not by Wulfstan. Bethurum excludes certain homilies and homiletic fragments by Wulfstan because of their connection to his law codes and Institutes of Polity, however, and combines manuscript witnesses in an attempt to produce “a corpus of finished, polished sermons,” obscuring Wulfstan’s habits of rewriting and revision (p. 2; see also pp. 23–24). The one other monograph on Wulfstan’s homilies, Karl Jost’s Wulfstanstudien (1950), predates Bethurum’s edition; though groundbreaking in its identification of sources, for example, it has largely been superseded by later work—such as the superb essays collected by Matthew Townend in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (2004). While the need for a new edition remains, a volume drawing on these and other scattered Wulfstan studies has long been overdue. Building on her insights from three previous articles, this consolidating work by Lionarons offers scholars an erudite single point of reference.

Lionarons’s study focuses on three aspects of Wulfstan’s writings: first, manuscript witnesses to and the boundaries of Wulfstan’s canon; second, characteristic themes and concerns of his work; and third, his processes of composition and revision. Chapters One and Two deal with the issue of Wulfstan’s canon, in which notions of genre and originality both play a role. On the one hand, Lionarons rightly notes that “homiletic” is a problematic category: as she shows further in Chapter Eight, the line between sermons and law-codes was hardly a strict one for Wulfstan, with a similar tenor and language appearing in both. On the other hand, as with Ælfric, compulsive authorial revision, borrowing, and later adaptation by anonymous compilers decidedly complicate the task of an editor attempting to distinguish individual, self-contained, “original” sermons. Reality is far messier. Having surveyed in Chapter One the contents of manuscripts associated with Wulfstan, in Chapter Two Lionarons interrogates the principles (stated or implicit) employed by Bethurum and others to identify Wulfstan’s works and considers liminal cases to “re-establish” the boundaries of Wulfstan’s canon.

In Chapter Three, she turns from canonical concerns to eschatology, one of Wulfstan’s key characteristic concerns. Scholars, she notes, have largely followed Malcolm Godden’s contention (“Apocalypse and Invasion in Anglo-Saxon England,” in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English [1994]) that Wulfstan’s understanding of foreign invasion changes between his early eschatological homilies and later versions of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, moving from a New Testament paradigm in which turmoil may herald the time of Antichrist, to an Old Testament lens in which chastisement comes from God to turn people from their sins. Lionarons suggests that Wulfstan’s thought was “neither simple nor compartmentalized,” showing that he actually sets forth both perspectives simultaneously in his early and later career (p. 4). Examining Wulfstan’s eschatological works in detail, Lionarons considers the extent to which they were in fact millennially inspired, their depiction of Antichrist, and the Biblical passages on which Wulfstan and his contemporaries drew. Regarding his tone, she concludes that Wulfstan’s primary aim throughout was to teach and...