The Wolf's Testimony to the English: Law and the Witness in the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos

by ANDREW RABIN

In her 1998 article, "Body and Law in Late Anglo-Saxon England," Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe describes the years between 970 and 1035 as "a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject." During this period, she argues, physical punishment came to be seen as a way of reconstituting the human body as a legal text, thereby producing a subject "about [whom] things may be known" by juridical authority. In doing so, the law extended its reach beyond the realm of governable behavior and "inward to the soul." recent responses to O'Keeffe have focused principally on her analyses of mutilation and the embodied subject in order to reassess the relationship between corporeality and social control in such other areas of Anglo-Saxon culture as poetic composition, manuscript illumination, and early legislation, just to name a few. In this article, however, I return to the years just prior to 1035 with the intention of examining a different facet of legal subjectivity in late Anglo-Saxon England. In particular, I focus on the writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, whose career roughly corresponds to the latter half of O'Keeffe's "crucial moment," to enhance our understanding of what might be called late Anglo-Saxon legal consciousness. While O'Keeffe rightly notes the archbishop's contribution to discourses of bodily mutilation, I suggest that Wulfstan deploys old English notions of witnessing and testimony to frame a new concept of the mind before the law as well.