Welcome to the swiss Becket Project

For Medievalists the Becket-Henry affair presents an ideal case study: the career of Thomas Becket, culminating in his murder (1170) is undoubtedly the best documented event in the twelfth century. The dramatic martyrdom of the Archbishop of Canterbury generated an unusual number of biographies, letters, histories. New avenues of research are now opening up for Philologists, since recent studies have begun to show that Becket's eruditi wrote not only in Latin, but also in the vernacular (i. e. Anglo-Norman and French).

For Becket's circle, literature was too important to be excluded from the re-moralization of the Plantagenet's life. Lay and clerical domains of worship were certainly distinct, but they were not neatly divided, either liturgically or physically. Nothing supports the polarity between a "lay piety" of "private" and "devotional" literature and a clerical art that was "public," "regulatory," and "liturgical". The language of government and diplomacy was Latin, but we cannot doubt that Becket's eruditi were at home in the vernacular too.

The project, conceived and led by Prof. Dr. Carla Rossi (University of Zurich) will focus : 1. on the relations which vernacular authors forged with those eruditi (Rossi is investigating, for instance, the influence wielded by Becket's circle over the first woman writer in French, the poetess Marie de France, and by "Dame Marie" over the two Barking nuns, writers of two hagiographic Anglo-Norman poems) 2. on the cultural program pursued by vernacular authors and by the circle of Canterbury scholars, whose purpose was to establish traditional, epochal genealogical and religious foundations for courtly Anglo-Norman society.

Books