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

Critical Essay by Jonathan Wilcox

SOURCE: Wilcox, Jonathan. “The St. Brice's Day Massacre and Archbishop Wulfstan.” In Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Diane Wolfthal, pp. 79-91. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000.

In the following essay, Wilcox concentrates on Wulfstan's relationship to the English massacre of Danish settlers in 1002 in order to discern the Archbishop's views on reconciliation and peaceful coexistence in a Christian polity.

As a preacher and legislator in late Anglo-Saxon England, Archbishop Wulfstan was in a position to play a significant role as peacemaker in violent and divisive times. The archbishop's attitude to those times has been preserved in a significant body of writing that makes him one of the most articulate voices from the reigns of Æthelred II and Cnut. In this essay, I will examine how Wulfstan handled the role of peacemaker by focusing first on a spectacular breakdown of peaceful...
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