The Clerical Dilemma

John Cotts’s study of Peter of Blois faces two difficulties from the outset: the complexities of Peter’s character and the opaqueness of his class as a subject for historical analysis. The author opts for a judicious negotiation of tangled indicators and bodies of evidence. Single lines of argument have made Peter of Blois into a humanist of dubious reputation (R.W. Southern), a plagiarist (Philippe Delhaye), and a grovelling and ambitious courtier (C.L. Kingsford in the Dictionary of National Biography). His literary activity spans three different scenes: twelfth-century humanism, monastic spirituality, and court society (including ecclesiastical and secular courts). Cotts enters each of these scenes and confronts the contradiction which such boundary-crossings inevitably forced Peter of Blois to confront. The quandary of the cleric seeking legitimacy while caught in crossed obligations is what he calls ‘the clerical dilemma’. What emerges from Cotts’s study is not a consistent thinker, character and actor in twelfth-century intellectual, religious and social life, but a bundle of contradictions. The class of clerical courtiers in which Peter of Blois spent his life is the key to understanding this web of conflicting sentiments and obligations. As Cotts consistently argues, the clerical dilemma is a balancing act of a man with shifting obligations, an advocate and servant of the king, a critic and advocate of the king’s servants—a man who is or was also himself a king’s servant

Biography · Dilemma · Epistemology · Humanism · Magistrate · Political science · Servant · Sociology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy