ABSTRACT
This chapter invites learners to rethink their sense of textual authority. This is especially true in the context of a state where political changes were shifting the status of English and its valence at the royal court, but the afterlife of Archbishop Wulfstan's works and the use of sources in the Encomium also point them toward some of the ways that the diachronicity of textual communities can function. Wulfstan's origins are unclear. In British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.xiv, a Latin poem in praise of Wulfstan appears on folio 148v, while three lines of verse playing on Latin parallels for the elements of Wulfstan's name appear on Cotton Tiberius A.xiii, folio 101v. The Encomium Emmae Reginae and the political tensions surrounding the Anglo-Danish regime have received comparatively little scholarly attention, although these tensions in fact laid the foundation of the more widely acknowledged Norman Conquest that followed a half century later.
