12 - Wulfstan, Episcopal Authority, and the Handbook for the Use of a Confessor

Summary

This essay considers some questions raised by the assemblage of penitential texts known since Roger Fowler's edition of 1965 as “A Late Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor” (and by other names in the years prior). A particular (though not exclusive) concern in the following pages will be its possible relationship to Archbishop Wulfstan of York and with peculiarities of his thinking on matters of law and pastoral care. In spite of their importance to our understanding of the Handbook, these matters have received little sustained attention, though speculations about its authorship are traceable at least as far back as Benjamin Thorpe's edition of 1840, which said the following on its likely provenance:

[R]eferences in the ‘Modus Imponendi Poenitentiam’ will at a glance enable the reader to perceive, that the whole is an abridgement of Ecgberht, the work apparently of a bishop (perhaps Dunstan) very sensitive with regard to the infallibility of his order, if such an inference may be drawn from the circumstance, that, in laying down the penalties for crime to be paid by each class of the clergy, he carefully omits mention of the bishop, who, in the Penitentials of Theodore and his translator Ecgberht, is usually placed at the head of the list.

Thorpe's observations about the concern of the text for maintaining the privileges of bishops remain a part of present-day commentary even if his attribution of the text to Dunstan fell flat. That Wulfstan is the more probable candidate has not been seriously questioned in the five decades since Fowler's edition attributed this text to the prelate. Yet the nature of Wulfstan's role in its preparation remains a matter of uncertainty, with even Fowler's arguments to this effect being notably cautious. To Fowler, evidence tying the text to Wulfstan was chiefly codicological: “The fact that the Handbook is found in manuscripts connected with Wulfstan is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of his having assembled the work” (7). The stylistic tests then being used to broaden the Wulfstanian corpus yielded little, in Fowler's view, when brought to bear on the Handbook. His concluding remarks on the subject could even be understood as retreating from claims of outright authorship.