I have some sort of rule about not featuring my students on this blog, as you may have observed. It’s not fair on them to be identifiable in such a fashion, I figure, and looks unprofessional and gossipy. Sometimes, however, just sometimes, the exigencies of due credit require a breach of this rule. I cannot, cannot pass up the chance to blog this gem that one of my students the term before last found in the reading, and since I hadn’t seen it myself I think she deserves credit. I have checked with her and she’s cool with that so all due praise to her and on we go. I quote no-one less than Giles Constable:

… there was an active exchange of manuscripts among religious houses in the twelfth century. Peter the Venerable wrote to the Carthusians in 1136/7 asking for a volume of the letters of St Augustine ‘because by accident a bear ate a large part of ours in one of our dependencies’.69



…



69 Peter the Venerable, Ep. 25, ed. Constable, I, 47; see the notes in II, 112.

This only goes to prove that Carl was right, as so often, to warn us all from Got Medieval: “When you least expect it… expect BEARS!!!” Though how one got a taste for Augustine, I guess that Peter sadly felt it unedifying to explain…

The quote from Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century , Trevelyan Lectures 1985 (Cambridge 1996), p. 222, cit. Jane Cahill, “Why did the monastic ideal exercise such a potent influence upon both clergy and laity before c. 1200?”, unpublished essay for the course ‘General History II: the formation of medieval Christendom, 1000-1300‘, 1st November 2011; Constable’s reference is to Constable (ed.), The Letters of Peter the Venerable , Harvard Historical Studies 78 (Cambridge 1967), 2 vols.

51.752448 -1.255184