Napier's ‘Wulfstan’ homily xxx: its sources, its relationship to the Vercelli Book and its style

Abstract

The item which Napier printed as no. xxx in his collected edition of the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan and which is extant complete only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, written at Worcester in the third quarter of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as a compilation in which a few sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remarkable patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century anonymous writings. Karl Jost has stated that the opening and concluding sections consist of extracts from theInstitutes of Polityand from Napier's homilies xxiv, xlvi and ii, while in the middle section he has identified parallels to two Vercelli homilies, nos. iv and ix, and to Napier xlix, which also occurs in the Vercelli Book as homily x. He has speculated that for another passage the compiler may have drawn upon an earlier version of a text now surviving in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, but he missed a parallel with Vercelli xxi which had been noted by McIntosh. What in effect Jost and others have shown is that in a ‘scissors and paste’ homily in which no more than a few sentences can be ascribed to the compiler (and these perhaps only because he took them from books since lost) we find extracts from a considerable number of works. The purpose of this article is to examine again the sources of the compilation, to show that very probably more than half of it was drawn from a single codex similar to the Vercelli Book, and to illustrate the influence Wulfstan's writings and style had on its author.

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