The 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).

The common thread throughout the works of Becket's eruditi and Anglo-Norman vernacular authors is the attempt to redeem their Celtic and Saxon origins. These are the origins of the new ruling class in England, meaning to say the intermingling of Bretons, Normans and Saxons, comprising counts, barons, knights, bishops, treasurers of the Plantagenet court, all of whom were depositories of a heterogeneous culture for whom it was necessary to unearth new shared roots. In this regard J. Dufournet’s considerations are most interesting: “In the same way as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales, Walter Map clearly represents those writers who were half Welsh and half Norman and who had never denied their own origins; in fact far from it, they taught their Celtic culture to their Norman conquerors”. Celtic culture was therefore to form a cultural glue. The remembrance of their Celtic origins, distinguished by cultural and linguistic features shared with Bretons, Welsh and Irish, was an authentic source of grievance for men of letters in Henry II’s court, committed as they were to the complex task of establishing the origins of the Plantagenet line, dating back to Arthur, who was descended from the Trojan heroes. “new public” is paradigmatically represented by those whom we could define as “new Bretons”, in the sense of “great British Bretons”; whilst Pelagius, St Patrick, Gildas, the shadowy Nennius, Asser and Peter Abelard, mentor of the majority of the eruditi Thomae, were Bretons by birth, at the Plantagenet court we find figures who were ethnically mixed, such as, first and foremost, the ex-Chancellor of the kingdom, close friend of King Henry II and then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, who was culturally French (inter alia he had studied at Paris and Chartres) and who spoke French as his first language, a second-generation Norman, but Saxon by adoption, in the multi-ethnic Cheapside district, and who were capable of expressing themselves in perfect English, in addition to French and Latin.

The project aims to investigate the cultural program pursued by vernacular authors and by Thomas Becket and his eruditi, whose purpose was to establish traditional, genealogical and religious foundations for courtly Anglo-Norman society.

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 project, originated and led by 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.