The Letters of Adam Marsh

Abstract

Professor C.H. Lawrence's edition of Adam Marsh's letters has been long and eagerly awaited, and for some obvious reasons. Marsh enjoyed high standing in two different but related worlds. The greatest biblical scholar of his age, and lector to the Oxford Franciscans for most of the 1240s, he was in the vanguard of those who sought to make available the academic learning of the schools as a practical instrument for the pastoral training of the priesthood. Yet he was also intensely involved with secular society, often more so than he wished to be: frequently at the beck and call of the king and queen, the religious counsellor of Simon de Montfort and his wife, and an attender at parliaments and councils, he found that the value set on his spiritual advice, and on what Lawrence rightly calls his ‘practical sagacity', brought its own form of punishment. The letters which record much of this multifarious activity are characterised in the present edition as ‘arguably the most important collection of private letters to have been produced in England before the fifteenth century'. Yet they have hitherto been extremely difficult to approach. Marsh's style is prolix, rambling, opaque and syntactically complicated—the Latin equivalent of late Henry James, and the bane of many scholars, who have probably resorted, in shamefaced secrecy, to the useful guide provided by J.S. Brewer's brief English summaries and marginal notes in the old Rolls Series edition. Now, however, we can at last discard Brewer not only for a modern edition of the text but, especially, for a translation. For this the present editor may be blessed by generations yet unborn.