Archbishops Ralph d’Escures, William of Corbeil and Theobald of Bec. Heirs of Anselm and Ancestors of Becket by Jean Truax (review)

Abstract

Archbishops Ralph d'Escures, William of Corbeil and Theobald of Bee. Heirs of Anselm and Ancestors of Becket. By Jean Truax. [The Archbishops of Canterbury Series.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xii, 293. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-754-668-336.)This book is one of a series on of Canterbury aimed at students, academics, and broader audiences, but the summary on the back cover does Truax and her subjects a disservice. None, as Truax makes very clear, was a minor archbishop nor were they noteworthy' than others. Truax reminds us that these were three of the most important men in Anglo-Norman England, contextualizing their careers within narratives of the ecclesiastical and secular politics of their day, which, given their complexity, are admirably clear and straightforward. These are the first extended biographical studies of Ralph d'Escures and William of Corbeil to be published beyond the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the introduction to English Episcopal Acta 28: Canterbury 1070-1136 (Oxford, 2004); both, however, been the subject of unpublished dissertations. Denis BetheU's important articles on William are acknowledged, and Truax rightly makes considerable use of Avrom Saltman's exceptional biography of Theobald (London, 1956).On the back cover, the archbishops' terms are presented as a unified period, and a series editor notes that they have never been considered together as a transition between two of Canterbury's greatest Medieval archbishops before. This, although still too teleological, does better reflect the nature of the book, as Truax (to bring coherence to three very different archiepiscopal careers) picks out central themes of Lanfranc and Anselm's tenures and then traces their development through the terms of Ralph, William, and Theobald. Most prominent is what is here defined as a model of practical cooperation between king and archbishop and in relations with the papacy, to which all three are considered to consistently adhered as the relationship among church, state, and papal authority developed over the first half of the twelfth century. By the time St. Thomas Becket became archbishop in succession to Theobald, that model had been replaced by a Gregorian one in which bishops found themselves caught between traditional loyalty to kings and new commitments to a newly powerful papacy (although Theobald's relationship with King Henry II is less difficult and more Gelasian here than other recent research has suggested). …