Piety and the Wolf: A Corpus Approach to Faith and Normativity in Wulfstan’s Homilies

This paper seeks to analyse the proliferation of normative language throughout the homiletic work of Wulfstan, and the unique perspective these have on faith. Rather than adopting a standard methodological approach, this paper makes use of corpus analysis tools to identify all instances of normative material in Wulfstan’s work. By taking this large scale, quantitative approach to this material, this paper seeks to challenge old assumptions about the relationship of the Archbishop of York to social norms, and identify potentially new avenues for analysis. Early corpus work on Old English normativity indicate that on average, variants of the words riht (meaning right, or correct) and unriht (meaning wrong, or incorrect) are used once out of every hundred words in Wulfstanian homilies, which is five times more often than these words are found in Ælfrician or the Anonymous homilies. While this can partly be attributed to the relatively narrow lexical range of Wulfstan’s rhetorical style, it indicates a particular interest on his part in expressing ideas of what is wrong, and what is right, in his homilies. As an Archbishop, and a homilist, it is not surprising that Wulfstan has a strong relationship to faith, and his belief in the importance of establishing a Christian society is well documented. What this paper seeks to do is explore the particulars of Wulfstan’s style; to trace the proliferation of normative language throughout his work, investigate the connection faith and Christianity has to these ideas, and critically, to explore what areas of faith and normativity he was most concerned with, and how he expressed those concerns.

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