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Bible, lettres et politique

This 220,000-word long monograph combines a close reading of about 1,500 medieval letters with a methodological approach where political, intellectual and legal history meets biblical exegesis and textual analysis. Along the way, fields and objects as diverse as the representation of networks, the history of emotions, exegetical typology and canon law – not to mention the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, consulted and absorbed on a quasi-daily basis – required some serious attention. Although I have at times worked on other things, this has been my main project and goal for the last ten years.

The Bible is everywhere in medieval texts - much still has to be done to understand how and why. The famous conflict between Thomas Becket and King Henry II of England led clerics, the ‘masters of the Word’, to fight one another, as shown in the hundreds of letters that they exchanged. Those who referred to Scripture and its exegetical background thereby built their public persona and fought their battles. Becket and his companions also, very unusually, used the Bible as their main legal authoritative source.