:Law and Theology in Twelfth‐Century England: The Works of Master Vacarius (c. 1115/1120‐c. 1200).(Disputatio, number 10.)

Abstract

In recent years new studies have appeared about significant figures in twelfth-century intellectual history. Thinking only of books published in English, Bishop Ivo of Chartres, the elusive “Magister A.,” Gratian, and Peter Lombard have been accorded monographic attention. Master Vacarius, whom Jason Taliadoros characterizes as “no more than a shadow among the luminaries of the so-called twelfth-century renaissance,” can now be added to this array. Yet Vacarius deserves better from historians, and the present volume allows him to step out of the shadows as “teacher, lawyer, bureaucrat, papal judge delegate, theologian, cleric, and writer”: in short, as a substantial presence within the twelfth-century renaissance. Probably born in Lombardy late in the second decade of that century, Vacarius studied Roman law, perhaps at Bologna although no source reveals the exact location and other schools of secular law existed in Italy in the 1130s and 1140s. According to Robert of Torigny, “Master Vacarius” arrived in the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury between 1143 and 1149. An expert in Roman law, he probably also was versed in canon law and Theobald must have engaged his services initially in the complicated rivalry with Bishop Henry of Winchester. Vacarius seemingly was ordained as a priest in England, but in the course of his career he returned several times to the continent. Those sojourns included trips during which Vacarius attended the papal councils at Reims in 1148 under Eugene III, and at Tours in 1163 under Alexander III. His activities took him north in 1159, where he worked in the household of the archbishops of York until his death c. 1200.