VOLSTANO (Vulstanus) of WINCHESTER. — Monk of the monastery of St. Peter (later St. Swithun) of Winchester, d. after 1906.
His name appears among the witnesses who subscribed a document of 965, with the appellation “minister.” William of Malmesbury (De gestis regum Anglorum, II, 149; ed. W. Stubbs, in Rerum Britanniae medii aevi scriptores, XC, London 1887, p. 166) calls him “cantor Wintoniensis” (that is, “of Winchester”). He was a pupil of St. Etelvoldo (v.). Nothing further is known of his life.
In prose he wrote a Vita of his master (Acta SS. Ord. 1. Benedicti, V, Venice n.d., pp. 628-629, reproduced in PL 137, 81-104), which contains a poem in elegiac couplets on the dedication of the church of Winchester (PL 137, 100 ff.) and a lost treatise, “de tonorum harmonia,” which William of Malmesbury (loc. cit.) declares to be “valde utile.” His greater fame, however, is that of a hymnographer. There are known a metrical epistle on the life of St. Swithun (PL 137, 107-14), two hymns (one in elegiac couplets, the other in Sapphic trochees) in honor of St. Etelvoldo (ibid., 104 ff.), sequences for St. Etelvoldo (Anal. hymnica, 40 [1902], pp. 180-82), St. Swithun (ibid., 37 [1901], p. 265 ff., and 40 [1902], p. 288 ff.), St. Birino (ibid., 40 [1902], p. 154 ff.), and Saints Birino and Swithun together (ibid., 37 [1901], p. 138 ff.). Blume (v. BIBLICA) has moreover attributed to V. four abecedarian hymns of 23 elegiac couplets, preceded by additional couplets, with rhymed or assonant hexameters, dedicated respectively to St. Etelvoldo, to St. Birino, and two to St. Swithun: the first three were reworked in the 12th century by Orderic Vitalis, a monk of St-Evroul, who replaced the passages referring directly to the Church of Winchester (cf. Anal. hymnica, 48 [1905], pp. 9-18).
Echoes of Sedulius and Venantius Fortunatus are frequent in his verse.
Abhandl. III; L. Delisle, Vers et écriture d'Orderic Vital, in Journal des Savants, new series, 1 (1903), pp. 428-440; Manitius, II, pp. 442-46.