Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jonathan Wilcox

Critical Essay by Jonathan Wilcox

SOURCE: Wilcox, Jonathan. “Wulfstan and the Twelfth Century.” In Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, edited by Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, pp. 83-97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Wilcox considers the reasons for the steep decline in the rhetorical appeal of Wulfstan's homilies after the Norman Conquest of England.

Some Old English preaching texts were kept alive by being copied in the twelfth century more than others were. … Ælfric's homilies were re-used quite extensively; Wulfstan's homilies, by contrast, were re-used significantly less. In the eleventh century, Wulfstan's sermons were copied extensively and extracts were often taken over and made new by re-use in a new context.¹ In the twelfth century, on the other hand, there is only one surviving example of a manuscript copy of Wulfstan's vernacular homilies and only one example of a Wulfstan homily made new through extensive borrowing in...
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