John of Salisbury’s Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum (the so-called ‘longer Entheticus’) is a philosophical and satirical poem of 1,850 lines, in Latin elegiac couplets. It is the most enigmatic of John’s major works, and the least well understood. It has never attracted much attention, and such judgements as have been passed upon it have been, on the whole, cursory and dismissive. Yet the work must be closely scrutinized, if only that the evolution of John’s thought may be better understood. I hope to make a modest beginning in this enterprise by using the techniques of palaeography and textual criticism to throw light on the genesis and purpose of the Entheticus, and on its connection with the Policraticus and Metalogicon.

THE contents of what was described in 1885 as ‘the most extensive and the most interesting of the old Grammar School Libraries of Lancashire’, the Burnley Grammar School Library, shed interesting light on the state of religious controversy in the north between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The library, which, through the generosity of Burnley Grammar School and with the kind co-operation of the Lancashire County Library, is now on permanent loan at Lancaster University, forms, as presently constituted, a collection of 875 volumes, published mainly in the seventeenth century. It owes its foundation to, and, as we shall see, reflects the religious interests, aims, and viewpoint of, the Revd Henry Halsted (1641-1728), rector of Stansfield, in Suffolk, who left the whole of his personal library to the Burnley Grammar School in 1728. Shortly after Halsted’s death, the collection was augmented by a small addition of books presented by another clergyman, the Revd Edmund Towneley of Rowley, rector of Slaidburn, Lancashire. It is, therefore, essentially a clerical and religious library and provides an interesting example of what sort of material typical, affluent English incumbents of the Augustan and early Hanoverian period considered worthy of places on their study shelves. For purposes of comparison within the region, a collection by two laymen made in another northern town and, like the Halsted-Towneley collection, charitably gifted, the Petyt Library, built up to over two thousand volumes by two brothers in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and now housed within Skipton Public Library, with its heavy emphasis on divinity, can be profitably examined. In the essay that follows we shall consider the Burnley Collection as essentially that of its principal donor, Henry Halsted, and as enshrining his aims.

Writing of the early and impressionable years spent by Ailred in the household of king David of Scotland, Knowles, in a felicitous phrase, remarked that the Scottish court had been ‘something of a nursery of saints’ during the previous half-century. The conduct, character and traditions of that spiritual kindergarten he associated with ‘that âme d’élite’, the ‘exquisite St Margaret’, and the contrast between the Scotland of king David and that of his father Malcolm Canmore, the proliferation of religious vocations and works of practical piety which followed the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret, make his claim self-evident. Within the royal circle if the careers of David and Edith/Matilda, and in the next generation of Waldef and Ailred, supply conspicuous testimony they do not stand alone. For Ailred, writing C1153/4, Malcolm’s oldest surviving son Edgar was homo… dulcís et amabilis, cognato suo regi Edwardo [the Confessor] per omnia similis, while his successor Alexander ‘the fierce’, was ‘humble and loving to clerks and monks’. Litteratus, according to Ailred, his active interest in the conduct of church life, and his piety reflect the interests and example of his mother. As earl he was the only layman present at the opening of St Cuthbert’s tomb in 1104, while his father, allegedly, was present at the foundation of the new cathedral at Durham in C1093.

Mentalität als Denk-, Verhaltens- und Lebensweise eines Standes steht notwendigerweise in Wechselbeziehung zur kollektiven Lebensform einer Kultur tragenden Schicht. Zeigt erstere deren geistige Strukturen, so kann letztere auch materielk Kulturgüter, ihre Funktion im Leben des Menschen und die Weise des Umgangs mit materielle Kultur durch Menschen umfassen. Lebensform im engeren Sinn als die Einheit von Theorie und Praxis, wie sie im folgenden verstanden wird, fuhrt zur sittlichen Lebensgestaltung im Zusammenhang der humanistischen Bewegung. Von ihr, genauer vom Standesethos des hochmittelalterlichen Weltklerus kann anhand der mittelalterlichen Quellenlage nur die Rede sein.

In June 1829 John Angell James, minister of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church in Birmingham, wrote to his friend William Wilson Patton, minister of a Presbyterian congregation in New York, thanking him for his congregation’s interest in the spiritual welfare of the British churches.

Sovereignty—suprema potestas—in the later Middle Ages was not blessed with Austinian simplicity: it was a complex and contradictory thing. Held by the ecclesiastical and lay powers, held by pope, emperor, king, and city-state, few populi were subjected to one authority alone. Not only did there exist a hierarchy of sovereign powers in the Western community, de iure and de facto, but the suprema potestas was in itself limited. It was the extent of this limitation and the degree of sovereignty possessed by the various governments which exercised, to a very large extent, the minds of later medieval and Renaissance jurists. A major reordering of the relationship between the spiritual and secular authorities was occasioned with the propounding of the via media by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Thomistic doctrine did much to promote and enhance the importance of civil government at the expense of hierocratic theories, but, as Michael Wilks observes in his fundamental study of medieval sovereignty, it proved to be almost as dangerous to the concept of the societas humana as to that of the societas christiana. Quite simply, as long as moral standards were applied to earthly government, political evaluation was forced into the theological sphere, and so, to some degree, into the realm of papal determination. And to Thomistic influences, as Michael Wilks again remarks, the civilians nearly all succumbed. Laying their claims very largely upon the bases of Roman law and Aristotle, legists expounded a profoundly secular philosophy; but the seemingly logical conclusion—logical, that is, to the modern mind—that secular man was freed from the theological order was not reached. The pope retained both a unique degree of dignitas and a superior degree of authority; he was head of the populus christiana, and this awesome position bestowed upon him certain ultimate rights and responsibilities in the affairs of secular corpora, even though these corpora were sovereign entities. In other words, papal sovereignty, although increasingly restricted and relegated to the realm of theory as the early modern State evolved, none the less remained a potent force; indeed, as it will be seen, in a particular aspect it fulfilled for the jurist a critical need of the young State.

Among the works of John of Salisbury the short, unfinished treatise that we call the Historia Pontificalis represents his only incursion into the writing of conventional history.’ Indeed even this, like the Metalogicon, Policraticus and Entheticus, bears the stamp of his unique individual approach to any branch of thought; and to call it conventional is little more than a polite bow of acknowledgement to the graceful preface in which he passes it off as merely another continuation of the world chronicle stretching from the Old Testament through Eusebius and Jerome to Sigebert of Gembloux and Hugh of Saint-Victor in his own age.

‘Wonder not at our coming here, for unto you, Englishmen, God gave such a wondrous martyr, that he filleth nearly all the world with miracles.’ This admiring assertion, attributed to an archbishop and primate from the Nigros Monies – possibly Stephen, archbishop of Tarsus, which lies at the foot of. the Taurus Mountains in Armenia – provides a good introduction to the theme of this book, for it links Iceland, Canterbury and the eastern Mediterranean in a remarkable manner. The quotation comes from a lost life of St Thomas written in Latin by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide in Oxford, who died in 1174; but it is known only from its transmission through one of the longest texts in Old Norse, the Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, compiled in Iceland through the thirteenth century from English Latin sources. This Anglo-Icelandic example, however, is only one part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw the cult of the ‘wondrous martyr’ established, and not only at the official level, across the whole of the West, from Norway to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland, before the end of the twelfth century. The English martyr was probably depicted among the array of saints on the West front of Trondheim cathedral; his mosaic image stands next to that of St Silvester in the apse behind the high altar in Monreale; the headquarters of the Portuguese Templars at Tomar had a chapel with a reliquary containing fragments of his brains and blood; and French monks from Morimond brought the cult to Sulejów in the diocese of Gneisno in 1177.