SOURCE: Cross, J. E. and Alan Brown. “Literary Impetus for Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi.” Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 271-91.

In the following excerpt, Cross and Brown suggest that a military-themed sermon by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is a likely source text for Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.

‘No work smells less of the study.’ So Dorothy Whitelock firmly concluded her discussion of literary influences bearing on Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.¹ Yet one written source for two of the three versions of the sermon has been recorded,² the citation of Alcuin's reference to Gildas.³ Professor Whitelock also offered a probable influence from a passage within a manuscript of Wulfstan's ‘Commonplace Book’,⁴ being the lamentation on God's punishment for the sins of the English, in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 190.⁵ A writer's experience, however, from which he creates, derives from his five senses, not least sight and hearing, and that...