The letter that begins Peter of Blois’s letter collection may be an elegant fraud. Addressed to Henry II of England, it claims that the king himself asked Peter to compile the “letters I have written by and by to various persons” and “gather them into one little bundle.”¹ Perhaps Henry sufficiently admired the archdeacon of Bath to request more than 100,000 words of his carefully wrought prose, but a man of Peter’s energy and ambition hardly needed royal prodding to create a literary monument. Peter certainly inspires little confidence in his sincerity when he tells Henry that the letters, originally...

This bitter complaint introduces the only letter in which Peter of Blois reveals any significant information about his early life. A canon of Chartres cathedral, where Peter himself held a canonry in absentia, was waging a campaign of slander against him, and in whispers had accused Peter’s late father of gross immorality.² The gossip proved damning enough to cost him the cathedral provostship, which he coveted and which the archbishop of Sens had promised him. The damage done, he still assured his “dearest friends,” the dean of Chartres and the archdeacon of Blois, that his father, though somewhat impoverished, was...

One can only guess what the canons of St. Paul’s thought of the author they found in the manuscript Bishop Baldock left behind, or how they reacted to the experience, erudition, and spiritual outlook of an archdeacon from a hundred years earlier. But Peter of Blois was in good company in at least two respects. For one thing, by the time Baldock died, scribes on both sides of the Channel had been churning out copies of Peter’s letter collection for a century, and for another, his letters routinely appeared alongside those of such luminaries as Ambrose of Milan, Gregory the...

When Peter of Blois wrote his letters to Reginald de Bohun, he fashioned a relationship that was at once epistolary, professional, and intellectual. Although he and his ally interacted as fellow litterati who participated in the same clerical elite, their correspondence illustrates the iniquities that clerics had to confront and manipulate. It demonstrates that, as the “primary genre of literary expression for the school-trained,”¹ the twelfth-century letter also deployed school training amid the power negotiations of the learned. Reginald had probably trained at Paris and operated in similar circles of ecclesiastical politics, but he came from the well-connected de Bohun...

If the world of schools and masters presented Peter of Blois with both opportunities and difficult choices, the choices posed even greater dangers as he left behind the “scholarly militia” for the “curial militia” in the courts of bishops and kings. The same regular canon who challenged Peter’s learning, and so inspired the Invectiva in depravatorem, took issue with his career choices. Apparently he regarded Peter as just another courtly cleric, seeking to get rich by currying favor. This could not pass without an aggressive response:

You call a man a flatterer of the prince and an enemy of holy...

Over the course of his career in the ecclesiastical courts of Normandy and England, Peter of Blois found himself ideally positioned to observe the successes and failures of the Church’s leaders. He arrived in Normandy during the culminating years of the Becket controversy, and corresponded with (and sought the patronage of ) several major players in the dispute who would shape the future of the clergy as the dust cleared. Soon after Henry II did penance at Avranches and the pope absolved him of his role in Becket’s death, Peter came to England and for two decades watched as a...

In the first decade of the thirteenth century, as Innocent III tried to eradicate heresy and Francis of Assisi touched the wounds of lepers, as England suffered an interdict, and the schools of Paris approached their formal incorporation as a university, Peter of Blois thought about his career from London. As archdeacon he occupied a desirable stall in the choir, second in honor only to the dean of the chapter and the bishop himself. He continued to offer his opinion on the “knotty problems” of the realm and kept track of his prebends so as to preserve them from depredation,...

One of the frustrating aspects of recent scholarship on the twelfth century is that it has placed so many expectations on its actors. Monks are expected to resist Scholasticism and write about charity, Scholastics to systematize everything, clerks to seek out bishoprics, and kings to centralize their bureaucracies, while the papacy moves inexorably toward the Fourth Lateran Council. The personnel involved play their roles with varying degrees of brilliance, and history moves forward even as the conservatives bitterly protest. It is an attractive narrative, especially when wedded to notions of “renaissance,” and “reform” that grant it even greater significance for...