In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction 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 composed“in the tempestuous waves of the court,” have been left“in their native rudeness.”2 He purports, that is, to offer his king a series of extemporaneous documents produced in the course of his work as a secular cleric. But the many extant manuscripts of this collection betray Peter on this point, for they suggest that he revised and polished his letters. As much as his style and interests vary from letter to letter, one is hard-pressed to find instances of rushed or tortured prose in his corpus, let alone any traces of unrefined style. Peter had good reason to write carefully, for this dedicatory piece is about writing in the presence of royal power, power exercised , made known, and remembered through the written word. It makes perfect sense that it should be directed to one of medieval Europe’s greatest champions of literate administration. Whatever the precise nature of Henry and Peter’s relationship, the king provided the letter collection with its raison d’etre, both through his alleged request and his position as head of one of the most dynamic administrative networks of the day. Over the years, the contents of Peter’s letter collection shifted: some letters dropped out, new ones 1 1. Ep. 1, PL 207, 1. 2. Ibid. 2 Introduction were added, and some were substantially rewritten, but neither these alterations nor the king’s own death in 1189 displaced Henry’s name from its privileged position at the head of the collection. British Library manuscript Royal 8F xvii, even as its marginal additions and variant readings reflect changes Peter made in the 1190s, begins with a bold Henrico, its capital H rendered in brilliant blue, red, and gold. Having dispensed with conventional modesty and endowed his undertaking with a royal imprimatur, however, Peter accurately predicts the instability of the text he produced: Your eminence, I think, knows well that almost all my letters hung upon another ’s judgment, and it was sometimes necessary for me to write rather inelegantly on account of the urgent necessity of emerging events, sometimes briefly on account of the thinness of the material, and sometimes rudely, diffusely or plainly on account of the limitations of the people to whom they were written, or of those who were doing the writing.3 A writer with such constraints may not prove the most reliable witness to the things from which one would construct history. In one sentence Peter calls attention to the vagaries of inspiration, the pressures on a writer involved in pressing business, the need to write for an audience, and the unreliability of scribes. His admission that his letters“hung upon another’s judgment” (de alieno pendebant arbitrio) is particularly striking. Writing and collecting letters was, for Peter, anything but an easy reminiscing of the events germane to a cleric. In fact, despite his possibly disingenuous claims of rusticity and of royal enthusiasm for his writings, he managed to anticipate many of the modern historian’s anxieties about sources steeped in conventional sentiment and half-truths, while calling attention to the unpleasantness experienced by a midlevel ecclesiastical clerk. He testified, based on immediate experience, to the tumultuous nature of clerical life during the period when the written word, and those versed in it, took on a new importance in European political life. The explosion of literacy and changes in outlook that it occasioned has been well documented.4 Men like Peter, secular clerics who produced 3. Ibid., 2. 4. See especially M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell, 1993); and Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). For ways in which learned clerks like Peter in England experienced these changes, see Nicholas...

Share