This collection, the fruit of a conference held in 2013 at Cambridge University, responds to the long-ago wish of Beryl Smalley that Herbert of Bosham (d. 1194?) be studied ‘in the round’ (p. 27). This is no small task: Herbert was a formidable controversialist, a sophisticated theologian and biblical scholar, and the most voluble defender of Thomas Becket in the archbishop's conflict with Henry ii. As Michael Staunton notes, the study of ‘each aspect of his life requires individual expertise’ (p. ix).
Some aspects of Herbert's career are well-known to specialists. His role as Becket's most devoted, most truculent, advisor features in all major studies of the martyred archbishop. His expertise in the Hebrew language and biblical commentary, focused on the Psalter, are the subject of two monographs. That he guided the creation of deluxe manuscript editions of Peter Lombard's commentaries on the Psalms and Epistles has been likewise well-studied. A particular merit of this collection are the insightful essays on Herbert's other achievements.
Staunton opens the volume with a thorough biographical introduction to Herbert's life, works and milieu, especially valuable for its discussion of Herbert's Liber Melorum, a ‘difficult to categorize’ (p. 18) work that unites Herbert's devotion to Becket's cause to the heights of his literary ambition. This chapter also introduces the reader to Herbert's letter collection, discussed in greater detail later in the volume by Julie Barrau.
Barrau's essay, the fifth of the book's nine chapters, is a highlight. Like much of Herbert's oeuvre, his letter collection has suffered neglect. Nineteenth-century editors John Alan Giles and James Robertson disparaged Herbert's prolix, convoluted prose and distracting preoccupation with theology; each editor was disposed to cut or omit altogether letters deemed unlikely to advance historical scholarship. Barrau has retrieved manuscript witnesses to supplement published texts and situates the letters in their historical context through a sympathetic study of their rhetorical flourishes and theological arguments. Unlike other, more famous examples of the Ars dictaminis, usually produced as self-advertisement by ambitious clerics, Herbert's collection weaponised the genre, settling old scores with Becket's antagonists and memorialising his loyalty to his fallen lord.
Another outstanding contribution is Nicholas Vincent's study of J. A. Giles, the Victorian antiquarian, publisher, clergyman and (minor) criminal. Thanks to Giles's eager pursuit of continental manuscripts pertaining to English history, and his frantic need for cash, Herbert's works appeared in print, only to be pirated by that other energetic antiquarian, the abbé Migne. Vincent's discussion of the Victorian fascination with Becket within and outside the Oxford Movement is illuminating; his account of Giles's mishaps is as entertaining as it is learned.
Sabina Flanagan and Christopher De Hamel contribute chapters on the torturous path by which manuscripts of Herbert's life of Becket and its companion work, the Liber Melorum, reached the twenty-first century, passing through the hands of Giles's collaborator turned antagonist, Sir Thomas Phillips. Together with Vincent's essay on Giles, these chapters provide valuable insight into the contingent and haphazard events that underlie published versions of medieval texts.
Laura Cleaver examines the provenance of the best-known manuscripts associated with Herbert, the glossed Psalter and Epistle volumes produced for Becket's use in exile. As his ‘master of the sacred page’, Herbert mined the resources of the Becket entourage's hosts at the Cistercian monastery of Pontigny while preparing the extensively annotated texts. Cleaver weighs into the disputed question of the manuscripts’ site of production, arguing that while planned at Pontigny, the volumes were finished after Becket left the Cistercians and sheltered with the Benedictines of Ste Colombe, closer to the resources and patronage of the archbishop of Sens, William of the White Hands. The volumes were not completed until after Becket's murder in 1170, as evinced not only by a dedication to William but also by a melancholy depiction of Herbert himself, woeful and alone, gazing up at a martyred Thomas (pp. 82–3).
Herbert's anguish at the loss of his patron, student and companion is sensitively described in Michael Staunton's second contribution, a study of his long (and late) Vita Sancti Thomae. Staunton beats back critics impatient with Herbert's grief-stricken paroxysms and verbal pyrotechnics, arguing that they misunderstand the nature of Herbert's project. Staunton notes that Herbert described his work as a history of the martyr; his aim was to explain Thomas's impact on the world around him, before and after his death, while addressing Thomas's exceptional transformation from worldly courtier to militant archbishop. Staunton ably outlines Herbert's efforts to reconcile the contradictory impulses that marked Becket's development in personal, political and spiritual terms.
The preeminent Becket scholar Anne Duggan addresses other features that made Herbert unique among Becket's eruditi, the advisors – scholarly, political and legal -- who accompanied Archbishop Thomas's rise and fall. She notes that Herbert himself is the hardest to categorise, given his multiple roles as envoy, advisor and ghost-writer. Duggan effectively demonstrates the merits of Herbert's defects: his forceful personality, his audacity, his ferocious loyalty. Especially helpful is her discussion of the advice, often conflicting, that Becket received from his learned circle at moments of crisis.
Matthew Doyle's chapter on Herbert as the student and defender of Peter Lombard sheds light on a relationship little studied by scholars of either man. It reinforces Herbert's known connection to Parisian intellectual luminaries such as the Victorines, but also through Lombard to Peter Comestor, and to other Lombard students who rallied to defend his orthodoxy (p. 63). As Doyle notes, the depth of Herbert's theological expertise, and Lombard's influence thereon, had been ignored until recent studies by Michael Staunton, Jessica Weiss and Doyle himself.
Unlike many collections of conference papers, this one succeeds, thanks to its tight focus on the life and career of one figure and to the consistently high quality of the contributions. One need not be a Herbert enthusiast to find it useful; these essays enrich our understanding of the development of medieval ‘public intellectuals’, through the lens of one extraordinary cleric.
