This is a stimulating and informative study of Peter of Blois as a representative of twelfth-century clerical culture. John D. Cotts's book, the first full-length study of Peter's life, is at once richly satisfying in its scholarship and engagingly accessible in its writing.

Peter of Blois should be one of the best-known figures of the twelfth century, because he encountered and involved himself with the major political, theological, ecclesiastical, and intellectual issues of the period. His life spanned eighty years, from the 1130s through the first decade of the thirteenth century; his education took him to the great cathedral schools of northern France as well as to the law schools of Bologna; he served kings and bishops, including Henry II of England and two archbishops of Canterbury; he traveled widely across Europe and probably to the Holy Land; he was an extraordinarily prolific writer, working in nearly all of the major learned and sacred genres and industriously revising, compiling, and publishing his letters (of which 250 survive); he could be a fierce polemicist, a shrewd diplomat and legal scholar, or a dogged spokesman for the interests of his patrons; and he seems to have known or written to anyone who was anyone in the world of the royal courts, the papal court, the cathedrals, and the monasteries. His collection (which he himself put through several recensions or editions) was copied continuously through the fifteenth century, and survives in about 300 manuscripts.

But as Cotts suggests, modern scholarship has downplayed the contributions of Peter of Blois. Peter was a secular cleric who only late in life was ordained a priest, and he was never elevated to the eminence and power of a bishopric. He witnessed and participated in some of the most crucial political affairs of church and state, but always as the epistolary representative of the key players: “Peter stands out as a member of the middle ranks of the clergy who seems to have thrust himself into the literary world, with no great prelacy to add authority to his words” (55). He never produced a monumental reflection on culture, politics, or learning that would bear comparison with John of Salisbury's Metalogicon and Policraticus, or theological reflections that could stand with the great spiritual writings of his monastic contemporaries such as Aelred of Rievaulx or Bernard of Clairvaux. Indeed, he tended to borrow much from those contemporaries whose writings he admired; but for this kind of emulation and respectful citation, modern scholars have condemned him as a plagiarizer or simply dismissed him as an unoriginal mind. Moreover, what potentially would be the most personal and informative of his literary productions, his correspondence, which he first compiled during the 1180s, lacks the kind of continuous autobiographical detail that would give us the most intimate portrait of a twelfth-century clerical life.

On the other hand, his letters cover many subjects across the board, “filling a much wider array of purposes than those of his clerical contemporaries like John [of Salisbury] and Arnulf [of Lisieux]” (67). As Cotts shrewdly observes, it was the very broadness and variety of subject matter (from the personal to the official, from spiritual matters to business, complaints, and requests) that gave his collection its supreme popularity in the Middle Ages, while John of Salisbury's letter collection was, by comparison, little used (68–70). His letters encompass almost the entirety of the clerical and political elite of England, Normandy, and France, as well as Italy, Sicily, and Germany (64). This range made his collection useful to later generations of secretaries, students, and dictatores. Peter himself seems to have been aware of the possibilities of such usefulness, because not only did he revise his collection several times during his later career (in the book's appendix Cotts summarizes the various scholarly conclusions about how often, and to what extent, Peter revised the collection), but he also made his own contribution to the genre of the ars dictaminis, his Libellus de arte dictandi (ed. Martin Camargo, Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition [Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995]).

Cotts uses Peter's letters exhaustively, bringing together the dispersed details they offer in order to develop a biographical picture of Peter's career, and more importantly, to capture a full sense of his clerical outlook. It is a difficult task for the modern scholar to discover in Peter's writings the coherence and continuity of that secular outlook, and Cotts has succeeded in this endeavor with extraordinary precision and grace. While Cott does not confine himself to the letters, and indeed covers most of Peter's other writings as well, he foregrounds the letters because of the contemporaneity of the epistolary genre and the direct insight it gives to the pressures of the clerical community, power relations, patronage, and professionalism. The title of the book, The Clerical Dilemma, expresses its theoretical underpinnings: the career of Peter of Blois reveals “the balancing of professional, educational, and spiritual concerns in an uneasy synthesis” (15). After the first chapter, which newly constructs a professional biography of Peter, Cotts considers the larger context of clerical epistolarity (chapter 2), Peter's own intellectual formation as a literate cleric (chapter 3), the administrative and pastoral fields in which he worked (chapter 4), his involvement in the episcopal deliberations and crises of the period, including his reflections on the Becket affair (chapter 5), and Peter's own spiritual struggles as a churchman whose fundamental outlook was structured by the division between the secular and the regular clergy (chapter 6). Even as he admired the monastic orders and was drawn to the spirituality of the Cistercians, he concluded that “it is not fitting for all to labor in the militia of the regulars” (255).

Cotts's study of Peter's career has given us an important new perspective on the intellectual and literary culture of the twelfth century. Replete with elegantly translated quotations from the letters and many of Peter's other writings, his book illuminates the elite clerical culture of the twelfth century from the perspective of an active life lived in the ambit of the era's greatest intellectual developments. Cotts's book is a great achievement. The Catholic University of America Press is also to be congratulated on its very high standards of production, from careful editing and easily accessible notes to the beautifully sewn binding.