An Intruder at the Feast? Anxiety and Debate in the Letters of Peter of Blois

Abstract

O f all the writers associated with Henry II’s court, Peter of Blois could perhaps be seen as the most representative, the one who defines with the greatest clarity the intellectual coordinates of the Angevin world. 1 His letters repeatedly suggest a particular willingness to occupy the common ground of literary discourse in this period 2 —to make use of apparently conventional themes, images, citations, and arguments, in a way that, on the face of it, clearly provides a basis for Sir Richard Southern’s allegation that the “attractive exterior of his work” covers nothing more than “a deep emptiness, a lack of thought, of originality, of anything but conventional feelings.” 3 Yet Peter is rarely as simple, as unintelligent or as predictable as such an assessment might imply. Indeed, his dedication to convention is in many ways the most perplexing aspect of his literary persona, for the certainty and self-complacency that usually accompany most kinds of conventionality are, in his work, conspicuously lacking. As I hope to be able to show in this essay, it is precisely by recognizing and reworking conventions, adapting and juxtaposing particular routines of argument and association—sometimes in ways that are surprising and/or self-contradictory—that Peter makes his letters a vehicle both for a provocative description of the cultural landscape in which he lived and for a teasingly evasive display of his own personality. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.