Although Herbert of Bosham never wrote a theological masterpiece and did not rise to the heights of Church power, historians constantly find him in their sources when considering central problems in twelfth-century intellectual and ecclesiastical history. An intimate of Thomas Becket during the archbishop's lifetime and passionate guardian of his memory after his martyrdom, Herbert appears again and again as a political actor and as an author in the seven-volume Victorian Materials for the History of Archbishop Thomas Becket. [1] He has since become a central figure in most of the classic studies of the period. Frank Barlow mentioned him around forty times in his comprehensive biography of Becket (more than anyone save for King Henry II, John of Salisbury, and Becket himself), while Beryl Smalley devoted an entire chapter to him in her still essential study The Becket Conflict and the Schools. [2] More recently, scholars have viewed him as a highly original exegete and perhaps the most accomplished Hebraist in contemporary England.
Two volumes dedicated to Herbert's theology and his Hebraic studies appeared in the early 2000s, but there is still no comprehensive, book-length study of his life and works. As a result, Michael Staunton's new edited volume, though "it is not meant to be the last word on Herbert of Bosham" (xi), is both overdue and welcome. It is also extremely useful and enlightening. Based principally on a series of papers delivered at a 2013 conference hosted by the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, this relatively short collection consists of nine chapters that cover not only Herbert's career but also his modern reception, including several engaging accounts of scholars searching for, editing, and collecting relevant manuscripts. Unusual for this sort of volume, A Medieval Polymath proceeds chapter-by-chapter in an intuitively pleasing way, moving from basic introductions to his life and works to considerations of the content of his thought in his commentaries, historical writings, and letters, before concluding with three chapters on the collection and editing of the manuscripts of his writings.
The first two chapters, by Michael Staunton and Anne Duggan, effectively introduce Herbert's life as that of an intellectual in politics whose career revolved around Thomas Becket. From the time he joined the archiepiscopal household in 1162, through Becket's murder in 1170, Herbert remained Becket's loyal servant, and after that he sought to prop up his friend's legacy in several works until his own death around 1194. Staunton provides a comprehensive biography along with helpful summaries of Herbert's extant writings, and he and Duggan both identify the circle of Becket's eruditi as the key context for understanding his career as both an ecclesiastic and a writer. Like many intellectuals fighting on the unsteady lines of the Becket Conflict, Herbert emerged from the schools of Paris, where, he tells us, he studied under Peter Lombard. He seems also to have known the great Paris theologian Richard of St Victor personally. In 1157, he participated in an embassy to Frederick I Barbarossa recorded by the biographer Rahewin, and then he spent most of the 1160s in Becket's entourage, during which time he wrote parts of his letter collection. After the murder, Herbert apparently stayed in France, and produced the bulk of his extant writings there. Duggan explores Herbert's role in Becket's familia by sifting through evidence from archiepiscopal acta and other documents as well as from his own writings, and in so doing provides an especially compelling portrait of an eruditus operating in dangerous political waters. As deftly as any twelfth-century cleric, Herbert brought immense biblical knowledge to bear on the practical problems confronted bishops. Although his almost obsessive loyalty to Becket, combined with long-windedness, has negatively affected Herbert's reputation, Duggan observes that it was precisely these qualities that allowed him write "one of the best biographies of Thomas the archbishop and martyr" (54).
The next two chapters treat the content and form of Herbert's writings, and provide some insight into his literary and theological practices. Matthew Doyle surveys the ways in which Herbert read Peter Lombard's theology, and how he helped introduce it to England. In so doing he provides a wonderful account of how masters and students collaborated at Paris, and how Parisian ideas entered the household of a less-erudite prelate like Becket (Herbert was explicitly named a "master in the holy page" in Archbishop Thomas's household). In the 1170s, he demonstrated his pietas toward his master by producing handsome editions of the Lombard's commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline epistles. Laura Cleaver continues the theme of Herbert as book-producer with a lavishly illustrated chapter on Herbert's glossed books of the Bible. Since the glossed books were intended for Becket, they again illustrate the intersection of theology and clerical service, as Cleaver describes the expense, materials and labor required to make this kind of theological statement.
The fifth and sixth chapters treat two genres long regarded as essential for understanding the Becket affair and Herbert's role in it, namely epistolography and hagiography. Julie Barrau provides the first careful study of Herbert's letter collection, which is extant in a single manuscript that has been only partially edited. Becket again figures prominently: Herbert wrote eleven letters in persona Thomae, and devoted others to glorifying the martyr's memory. Continuing the volume's trend of considering Herbert as an exegete in politics, Barrau shows that the epistolary genre was ideally suited to transform the disputations of Paris into practical theology and so to "weaponize" scholarship through letters that were "erudite, prolix, passionate and at times vindictive" (103). Like Barrau, Michael Staunton considers how literati could manipulate genres in the service of political aims. In a methodologically innovative study of the work usually referred to as the Via Sancti Thomae and treated as a hagiography, he begins by noting that Herbert called it a Historia, and proceeds to consider the historiographical aspects of the work. He also, however, shows that Herbert, "a biblical commentator before he was a historian" (105), mapped Becket's history onto a scriptural background that shifted with the vicissitudes of his life. The martyr is likened to a new Joseph, a new Daniel, and so on.
The final three chapters hang together wonderfully, and reveal the travails that Herbert's corpus had to endure in order to reach modern scholars. Nicholas Vincent, in a piece that drips with wit and occasionally outright humor, narrates J. A. Giles's (1808-1884) sporadically successful efforts to edit and publish significant parts of Herbert's writings in the face of nemeses like the Abbé Migne and James Craigie Robertson (who included some of Herbert's work in the aforementioned Materials for the History of Archbishop Thomas Becket). This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the Victorians produced their editions, and in particular, how they did so in such relative haste. Sabina Flanagan follows with a study of some missing leaves of Arras MS 649, which contains Herbert's Historia Sancti Thomae, and provides additional insight on Giles's editorial work. Sadly, the manuscript was mutilated, but Flanagan tells a story with a happy ending: she follows evidence for the leaves from the 1820s until their purchase by Lambeth Palace Library in 2013. The volume concludes with Christopher de Hamel's engagingly personal account of his acquisition of manuscript leaves, one of which unexpectedly turned out to contain part of Herbert's Liber melorum. Here we see the author recounting his own experiences as a collector and placing himself in a much larger landscape that includes Victorian manuscript hunters, modern bookstores and auction houses, and that ranges geographically from Cambridge to Tokyo. Through these three concluding contributions (the last two of which include gorgeous plates) the authors remind us that much of the interest (and, if I may add, joy) in medieval studies derives from such encounters with remarkable textual artefacts.
Taken together, these essays convincingly make their case that Herbert of Bosham's writings, despite the ambivalent judgement of earlier scholars, still have much to offer students of the twelfth century and of medieval theology more generally. One might have hoped for a fresh assessment of Herbert's knowledge of Hebrew, but again, the volume makes no claim to be comprehensive, and what is here is incredibly useful. This should be the starting point for graduate students and other scholars seeking to understand Herbert's contributions to ecclesiastical culture as well as to learn the contours of his corpus and its reception. Beautifully illustrated and accessible throughout thanks to the contributors' uniformly clear presentations, Staunton's collection adds new layers to our understanding of the era of Thomas Becket and his circle of eruditi.
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Notes:
1. J. C Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, eds., Materials for the Study of Archbishop Thomas Becket, 7 vols, Rolls Series 67 (London 1875-1885).
2. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973).