1 The Worcester Collection of Canons Michael D. Elliot Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto Abstract: The Wigorniensis, the one major canonical collection known to have been compiled in Anglo-Saxon England, has been the subject of much controversy and confusion over the last five hundred years. The edition published in 1999 represents the culmination of several scholars’ efforts at the end of the twentieth century to resolve some of this confusion. However, the editors’ decision to edit only about half of the collection’s content ensured that much about the collection would remain obscure. The present paper seeks to bring attention to the collection in its entirety, and explores some of the problems still surrounding the collection’s origin, authorship, and later development. It is argued that the original version of the collection (‘A’, or the versio primitiva) probably originated outside the control of Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester (1002 – 1016) and Archbishop of York (1002 – 1023), but that all subsequent versions represent successive Wulfstanian adaptations of the original core. The collection’s textual tradition is examined and found to be, apparently, chaotic. A solution to this apparent chaos is proposed based on the peculiar conditions of manuscript production current in Worcester during Wulfstan’s pontificate, wherein individual gatherings (‘booklets’) were copied and combined in different ways to produce larger composite volumes of canonical material. It is suggested that other early medieval collections exhibiting symptoms of Ursprungskontamination similar to those of the Wigorniensis may have been produced under similar conditions. I. Introduction: The Context, Historiography and Title of the Collection Slowly, and not altogether steadily, over the last several hundred years scholars have been piecing together a picture of the role the Anglo-Saxons played in the development and spread of canon law collections in the early medieval period. The picture, as it is currently framed, is far from finished, but the main contours have already taken shape and many interesting details are now being filled in. Beginning in the seventh and eighth centuries, and fuelled it seems by the early Anglo-Saxon church’s strong ties to Roman models, we see in England the considerable influence of Italian canon law collections, most notably the Collectio Dionysiana II, Collectio Sanblasiana