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II HOMILIES AND HOMILETIC TRACTS This homily, likely the earliest surviving example of an address by Wulfstan to the royal council, survives only in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii. Two possible dates have been proposed for its composition: Jost raises the possibility that it may have served as an address to open legal deliberations
Archbishop Wulfstan of York is among the most important legal and political thinkers of the early Middle Ages. A leading ecclesiastic, innovative legislator, and influential royal councilor, Wulfstan witnessed firsthand the violence and social unrest that culminated in the fall of the English monarchy before the invading armies of Cnut in 1016. This book introduces the range of Wulfstan's political writings and sheds light on the development of English law during the early eleventh century. In his homilies and legal tracts, Wulfstan offered a searing indictment of the moral failures that led to England’s collapse and formulated a vision of an ideal Christian community that would influence English political thought long after the Anglo-Saxon period had ended. More than just dry political theory, however, Wulfstan’s works are composed in the distinctive voice of someone who was both a confidante of kings and a preacher of apocalyptic fervour. No other source so vividly portrays the political life of eleventh-century England: what it was, and what one man believed it could be.
Rogationtide, the three days immediately before Ascension Day, held a position of great significance in the Anglo-Saxon calendar. The festival’s history shows that it was associated with agricultural concerns from early times, which are reflected in the homilies, prayers, and field processions performed during that week. In Anglo-Saxon England, Rogationtide also enjoyed popularity as an occasion that was above all, I contend, defined as a communal event. The entire community participated in it through ecclesiastical practices as well as
survive from the early Middle Ages. 5 Among the most significant texts in this corpus are the laws, homilies, and political tracts produced by the early eleventh-century ecclesiastic Archbishop Wulfstan of York. Wulfstan was the leading English churchman of his day, serving as bishop of London from 996 to 1002, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York from 1002 to 1016, and
eleventh. An immediate and pressing apocalypticism is an important element in two homilies in the so-called ‘Sunday Letter’ tradition. The heterodox ‘Sunday Letter’, which claimed to have been written by the hand of God and delivered to St Peter’s in Rome, threatened dire consequences for failed sabbatical observance. The two closely related homilies, found in manuscripts of the eleventh
In a Christmas homily on the prologue in the Gospel of John, Bede offered one of his several recitations of the well-known patristic ‘exchange formula’ of salvation through the Incarnation of Christ the Word: He was born God from God, and he did not wish to remain only the Son of God; he deigned to become also Son of