Ostriches, spiders’ webs and Antichrist: Hypocrisy in writings of Pope Gregory the Great and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York

This article examines the use of the concepts of hypocrisy and the hypocrite in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) and Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002–23). Although separated by many centuries, these two treatments are connected through Wulfstan’s debt to Gregory’s ideas on the evil of hypocrisy, and particularly in his depiction of Antichrist as the chief of all hypocrites. Both use the idea of hypocrisy to critique their contemporary situation: for Gregory, the pride of the Patriarch John IV of Constantinople in adopting the title ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’; and for Wulfstan, the court politics in the turbulent final years of the reign of Æthelred the Unready.