ABSTRACT
It may be thought that Wulfstan's style has been described often enough to make further treatment unnecessary.l We are familiar with his lexical and morphological peculiarities, intensifying adverbs and adverbial tags, and rhetorical devices, which include alliteration, two-stress rhythmical patterns, word-lists, repetition. The features have been enumerated by critics and editors through the last eighty years. They have been the special concern of editors because the doctrine has grown up that the Archbishop's style is so idiosyncratic that its detection in a text can provide a basis for attribution. It is not the purpose of this article to consider the validity of this use of stylistic description, but to suggest that the selection of stylistic features for description, largely conditioned by the needs of authorship tests, has failed to provide a general literary description of the stylistic qualities. 2
Two scholars have written recently on the subject of Wulfstan's style: Professors McIntosh and Bethurum.3 Professor Bethurum's approach is summed up in the first sentence of her section on style: 'Wulfstan's homilies are the work of a skilled rhetorician and illustrate the teachings of the manuals of rhetoric which he must have studied.' Professor McIntosh is concerned with Wulfstan's rhythm, and the core of his argument is found in a much-quoted sentence: 'Wulfstan's prose consists of a continuous series of two-stress phrases related in structure to the classical half-line, and severely restricted in somewhat the same fashion to certain rhythmical patterns' (p. II4). He continues:
these phrases are always small syntactic units. They are not mere metrical motifs torn from the text by wilfully or arbitrarily cutting between two adjacent elements in a sentence which have an intimate syntactic connexion, for example, preposition and noun, or pronoun and verb. Some phrases are more
obviously separable than others, as is true of half-lines in the classical verse, but on the whole Wulfstan's prose is easier to split up on the basis of natural speech-pauses which delimit these small syntactic units, than the verse is ... (p. n6).
