A new collection of essays on the cult of Thomas Becket is long overdue. The last such collection was published over forty years ago (Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque international de Sédières 19–24 août 1973, ed. Raymonde Foreville [Beauchesne, 1975]). Though this new volume, containing just eight essays and focusing only on the first fifty years after Becket's death, is not nearly as rich or as extensive as Foreville's landmark publication, it is nonetheless a welcome contribution.
The introductory essay by Paul Webster is one of the most valuable pieces of the volume. In it, he attempts a “historiographical pilgrimage”—in essence, an overview of recent scholarship on the Becket cult. Though it is difficult to do justice to such a large body of material in a short essay, Webster does a very good job here. Read in conjunction with the bibliography provided at the close of the volume, Webster's essay is recommended for anyone wishing to see where scholarship on the cult has concentrated in recent decades. The next essay is by Anne Duggan, the undisputed doyen of Becket studies. For this volume, Duggan has produced another strong and spectacularly wide-ranging essay that pays particular attention to the political machinations in the immediate aftermath of the murder, the Becket liturgy, Henry II's penance, and the veneration of the martyr in Continental Europe. Duggan has addressed most of the themes in this essay in earlier publications, but a number of her formulations and interpretations here are new, and her footnotes are, as always, well worth the reading. Some of these notes seek to correct errors in the current historiography, while others point to important new contributions on the Becket cult that have appeared in non-English publications.
Marie-Pierre Gelin's essay builds on her previous work into the liturgy and iconography of Christ Church Canterbury to examine the ways in which the cathedral's stained glass cycles devoted to Saints Alphege and Dunstan, earlier archbishops of Canterbury, reflected and reinforced the Becket cult. The following essay, by Elma Brenner, demonstrates how much fresh material related to the Becket cult still awaits analysis. She takes as her topic the leper hospitals dedicated to Thomas Becket in Normandy, with particular attention to Mont-aux-Malades in Rouen. There has been little close analysis of the enormous number of religious foundations and dedications made in Becket's honor across Europe in the wake of his murder. Brenner digs deeper into the material available for Normandy, unpicking the ways in which these dedications were often linked to the founder's associations with Becket or with Henry II. She also makes the notable point that though lepers and leprosy have generally been considered only in conjunction with Becket's healing miracles, “the saint's association with Norman leper houses was linked less to bodily healing than to the cure of souls” (93).
Michael Staunton's contribution is an important review of the ways in which Thomas Becket was portrayed by writers of contemporary chronicles. William of Newburgh, Ralph Diceto, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Canterbury receive particular notice, but Staunton cites many others as well. As he notes, “Becket's murder was an essential part of any English chronicle of this period” (96), and this essay, like Staunton's book-length treatment of the Becket vitae (Thomas Becket and his Biographers [Boydell, 2006]), is a very useful guide to a large body of material.
The following two essays consider the marriages of the daughters of Henry II to foreign princes as vectors for the spread of Becket's cult. Collette Bowie focuses on Henry II's oldest daughter, Matilda, who was married to Henry the Lion of Saxony in 1168, while José Manuel Cerda looks at a younger daughter, Leonor, who married Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1170. The ways in which Henry II's daughters may have helped spread the cult have been a subject of interest for some time, and Bowie and Cerda provide a great deal of new contextual material in these essays. In the end, though, much of their work is in the realm of speculation. The only direct evidence of these daughters’ influence seems to be, for Matilda, an image in a German Psalter (referenced but unfortunately not illustrated in Bowie's essay), and, for Leonor, a notable charter confirming an earlier grant to an altar dedicated to Becket in Toledo Cathedral. It is hard to conclude from this that these women were chief flagbearers for Becket in their new domains, but Bowie's and Cerda's essays nevertheless serve as useful reviews of Becket's early cult in Saxony and Castile.
Next comes an essay by Paul Webster on the legacy of the Becket cult in the first major church-state dispute taking place in England after Becket's martyrdom: King John's objections to the election of the archbishop of Canterbury in the early thirteenth century. While Webster's essay is sound and he makes thought-provoking connections between the two disputes, there seems to be an interesting lack of explicit language evoking the Becket dispute in the later documents.
The volume's last essay is Alyce Jordan's study of the early thirteenth-century stained glass lancets portraying the life of Thomas Becket in the churches of Coutances and Angers. Two of the five surviving panels of the Angers cycle picture the murderers of Thomas Becket, an unusual feature Jordan is right to highlight. The arms of the Beaumont family appear in the borders of this window, and since Guillaume, the bishop of Angers who oversaw the glazing of this lancet, was a Beaumont, this window and its iconography likely had particular importance to him.
The editors are to be congratulated for the full bibliography and index found at the close of the volume, both of which greatly enhance its value. Webster's introduction and the essays by Duggan and Staunton provide important orientation to the field, while the other contributors’ essays demonstrate how much scope and source material remains for new research. This volume can serve as a launching point for future research into Becket's cult, by a wide margin the most important, widespread, and influential saint's cult originating in medieval England.
