John of Salisbury

Introduction

John of Salisbury (c. 1115/1120–1180) was a leading humanist in twelfth-century Europe, in as much as he reflected, and contributed to, the revival of classical thought in that century (Nederman 2005).

He was educated in the schools of Chartres and Paris during the 1130s, receiving training in the liberal arts from a number of notable scholars, including Bernard of Chartres, Abelard, and Gilbert of Poitiers. Subsequently he served in the Papal Curia and in the court of Thomas Becket. He was a prodigious writer, producing important texts in a number of genres, including historical writing, educational theory, and political theory. He left a large, for the time, corpus of letters. As an intellectual, he does not fit modern categories. He was not strictly a theologian, historian, jurist, or philosopher, and yet his writings make significant contributions to each of these areas. The diversity of his contributions reflects the relative looseness of disciplinary boundaries in...