The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c. 1170–c. 1220 ed. by Paul Webster and Marie-Pierre Gelin (review)

Sometimes medieval writers left us so little information about specific medieval saints that we can study only their cults rather than the saints themselves. Not so in the case of Thomas Becket. Because contemporaries recorded so much about him shortly after his death and because he was such an important political as well as religious figure, the scholarship on him abounds. As a result, study of the saint has tended to overshadow scholarship on his enormously important cult. This collection of articles, which includes pieces by two of the most important Becket specialists now active in the field, shifts attention from the man to the early decades of devotion to him.

The collection begins with a deeply researched and highly informative overview of the cult by Paul Webster. It provides an excellent introduction to the subject of the book along with an extensive account of the existing scholarship. One relatively minor aspect of Webster’s piece that nonetheless stood out to me is his discussion of material culture related to the cult, including ampullae, badges, vestments, and Limoges caskets. Collectively, these objects give an idea of the scope of the cult and provide a sense of how it was spread in ways other than the spoken or written word. The second article is also an overview, in this case by Anne Duggan, who brings to bear her deep knowledge of the writings surrounding Becket. She discusses reasons, including some quite subtle ones, why Becket, who was by no means the only bishop murdered in the period, became such an important saint. Duggan provides an especially thoughtful discussion of the early liturgy related to the saint.

Subsequent essays are more specialized. Marie-Pierre Gelin provides a fascinating picture of how the monks of Christ Church Canterbury connected Becket, largely an outsider to the community even as archbishop, into the traditions of their church. In particular, they sought to tie Becket to Dunstan and Alphege, two of his predecessors who had previously been the two major saints of the community. The monks did so not only by emphasizing the similarities of Becket to his precursors, especially Alphege, who had been murdered by the Danes, but also by treating Dunstan and Alphege as visual prefigurations of Becket in the depictions of them in stained glass windows. Elma Brenner discusses the surprisingly large number of leper houses in Normandy dedicated to Becket, including some founded or refounded by men who had been foes of the saint in his lifetime, most notably Gilbert Foliot and Henry II himself. Michael Staunton, who has written so ably on the hagiographical works on Becket, systematically discusses the appearance of Becket in chronicles and other writings. Colette Bowie and José Manuel Cerda argue that after Henry II embraced the cult of his former friend, then enemy, his daughters, Matilda and Leonor, had a crucial role in spreading the cult to the lands of their husbands, Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and King Alfonso VIII of Castile. Webster, in a second article, compares the Becket controversy to John’s dispute with Innocent III over the election of Stephen Langton and shows the impact of the Becket controversy on the later dispute. Alyce A. Jordan uses post-colonial theory and extensive prosopographical work to analyze windows dedicated to Becket at Angers and Coutances, and though I was not convinced by all her specific arguments, I found her methodology intriguing. Overall, the collection provides a wealth of interesting information and ideas about the cult of St. Thomas Becket in its first half century.