SOURCE: Orchard, A. P. McD. “Crying Wolf: Oral Style and the Sermones Lupi.” Anglo-Saxon England 21 (1992): 239-64.

In the following excerpt, Orchard investigates the principal elements of Wulfstan's homiletic style, maintaining that the “essence of Wulfstan's technique is repetition.”

Archbishop Wulfstan enjoyed a high reputation as a stylist amongst his contemporaries; when he was still bishop of London (996-1002) one correspondent spoke of the ‘very sweet wisdom of [his] eloquence and the richness of [his] composition fittingly organised’, whilst the wide dissemination of his sermons and their susceptibility to imitation bear dual witness to his popularity throughout the eleventh century.¹

For modern readers, however, the problem of defining the origins of Wulfstan's sermon style has proved acute. On the one hand, Dorothy Bethurum pointed to a whole battery of ‘manuals of rhetoric that Wulfstan knew’, by authors such as Alcuin, Isidore and Hrabanus Maurus, and she gave several examples...