Reviews 921 Hainault as rulers of Morea highlights the fact their overlord imposed conditions on them that were made public through proclamation. Moreover, there are occasional misreadings: for instance, “devers Costantinople” (par. 189, at p. 67) means “on the side of Constantinople,” not “apart from Constantinople” (p. 71); “li Latin” (par. 668, at p. 267) should be “the Latins,” not “the French” (p. 148). Other passages could have been rendered more persuasively: “du grant despit que elle ot de ce que sa suer lui ot dit” (par. 422, at p. 163) is better understood as “because of her great pique at what her sister had said to her” rather than “because of the scornful words her sister said to her” (p. 108); “deviserent la teneur” (par. 595, at p. 239) as “they explained the meaning” rather than “they arranged to have them read” (p. 136); “heant la seignorie et la conversacion des gentilz hommes” (par. 665, at p. 265) as “hating the lordship and proximity of noblemen” rather than “hating the aristocracy and the behaviour of noblemen” (p. 147). Finally, some factual errors have crept in: “a Saincte Sophie a la maison des Freres Preceours” (par. 410, at p. 158) refers to the Dominican church the princely court used for assemblies, and not to “the Franciscans’ monastery” (p. 106). Nonetheless, this is a careful translation. Van Arsdall and Moody display considerable skill in rendering episodes such as that of the preliminaries to Isabelle of Villehardouin’s marriage to Philip of Savoy (par. 841, original at p. 333; translation at p. 177). They also work hard to provide background material, incorporating into the volume an introduction to historical events (6–25), a timeline (27–34), and an annotated index of named persons and places (215–51). They draw attention to the role in the narrative of hitherto unnoticed female figures by appending a “list of unnamed women” (253–56). Both translation and scholarly apparatus should be commended for making the French Chronicle of Morea more accessible and facilitating future engagement with it. Teresa Shawcross, Princeton University Paul Webster and Marie-Pierre Gelin, eds., The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c.1170–c.1220. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2016. Pp. xviii, 252; 11 color and 2 black-and-white figures. ISBN: 978-1-78327-161-0. Table of contents available online at https://boydellandbrewer.com/the-cult-of-st-thomas -becket-in-the-plantagenet-world-c-1170-c-1220.html doi:10.1086/698543 Veneration of Saint Thomas Becket was widespread across medieval Europe, with his shrine rivaling Rome and Compostela in its ability to attract pilgrims for over three centuries. Yet scholars have yet to explain precisely why Saint Thomas was so popular. Other European bishops were assassinated and became locally venerated saints, but none received the acclaim of Becket. The present collection of articles explores this question from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Paul Webster introduces the volume, which originated as papers given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, with an up-to-date bibliography. Anne Duggan leads off the collection with an overview of the speedy transformation of Becket from beleaguered archbishop to one of the most widely venerated saints. Duggan is not only a leading scholar of Becket’s life, but she was also the first Anglophone historian to carefully study Becket’s cult. In her article, she identifies John of Salisbury’s circular letter of early 1171 describing Becket’s martyrdom and the earliest miracles at his tomb as the keys for Becket’s unusually rapid ascent to sainthood. The letter was quickly incorporated into liturgical texts to commemorate Becket’s murder. Duggan then reviews the vivid and colorful liturgical offices that spread Becket’s cult across Europe, before turning to Henry II’s reconciliation with “Saint Thomas” and the dynastic devotion of Henry’s family for their new paSpeculum 93/3 (July 2018) 922 Reviews tron. From her essay, one can discern some of the key reasons for the expansion of Becket’s cult: (1) Henry II and his heirs appropriated him as a family patron; (2) he was a martyr for the freedom of the church from the crown; and, (3) because he was, as Duggan terms it, the “people’s saint.” Under the theme of Angevin appropriation, Elma Brenner’s contribution traces the association of Norman leper houses with Saint Thomas. The largest and most famous leper house in Normandy, Mont-aux-Malades, was rededicated to Saint Thomas by Henry II in 1174. Collette Bowie and José Manuel Cerda trace how the dynastic marriages of Henry II’s daughters spread Becket’s cult to Europe. Bowie discusses Matilda, who married Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria. She asks why Henry’s daughter would devote herself, as the evidence suggests, to the cult of her father’s enemy. Bowie concludes that Matilda was participating in the appropriation of Becket’s cult for royal purposes, which Henry himself had begun as soon as he realized that he must accept some indirect guilt for the murder. Cerda considers Eleanor, who married Alfonso VIII of Castile. While the direct evidence is “inconclusive” (142), the cult of Becket did begin to blossom in Iberia during Eleanor’s life, and it seems she and her English retinue contributed to its growth. Using postcolonial theory as a framework, Alyce Jordan argues against the traditional view that stained-glass windows at Angers and Coutances celebrated Becket’s refuge in the lands of the Capetians. Instead, she sees their unusual iconography as a vehicle for families historically connected to the Plantagenets to reinforce their association with that dynasty, even after Philip II had conquered Normandy and Anjou and absorbed these lands into royal territory. Regarding the freedom of the church from royal power, Marie-Pierre Gelin contributes a fine article showing how the monks of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury created stained-glass windows linking Becket with two of his sainted predecessors. Gelin argues convincingly that the images of two Anglo-Saxon monk-archbishops, Elphege and Dunstan, were depicted in ways that emphasized their own commonality with Becket’s life and martyrdom. For example, the windows emphasized Dunstan’s intervention to save King Eadwig’s soul from hell. Michael Staunton’s essay surveys Becket’s reception among English writers and chroniclers in the fifty years after his death. Staunton concludes that Saint Thomas was malleable enough a figure to be used both “in support of and against kings and ecclesiastics” (110), which may have minimized his impact on disputes in which he was invoked. Staunton’s claim seems reasonable, but it certainly did not result in Becket being invoked any less frequently by disputants, as shown by Paul Webster’s contribution, which discusses the role of Becket’s memory in the disputed Canterbury election under King John. Pope Innocent III placed England under interdict and eventually excommunicated John, who had refused to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop. Webster’s article engages both of Duggan’s first two themes, since John was a benefactor of Becket’s shrine, and both John and Innocent invoked Becket to bolster their arguments. Neither Staunton nor Webster say so, but I would suggest that it is the very malleability of Becket’s cult that contributed significantly to its longstanding popularity. Duggan’s final theme—Becket as the people’s saint—is woefully unexamined in this book. In the editors’ defense, Becket’s shrine has been studied by Benjamin Nilson (1998), his miracles have recently received attention from Rachel Koopmans (2011), and archaeologists have been collecting surviving pilgrim badges for generations. If no one could be found to speak to this aspect of the cult, then, at the very least, the contributors could have integrated this theme into their work. For example, Elma Brenner, in her essay on Norman leper houses, argues that these houses were dedicated to Thomas Becket to attract donations because his cult was “fashionable” in the late twelfth century. Additionally, she notes that, since lepers were increasingly seen as undergoing a form of martyrdom, cleansing their sins through suffering, Saint Thomas, as an undisputed martyr himself, would have encouraged this understanding of the religious value of leprosy. She emphasizes that Becket was not chosen as a patron in the Speculum 93/3 (July 2018) Reviews 923 hope of miraculous cures because “medieval people recognized that leprosy was a chronic” disease (82). However, William of Canterbury, collector of Becket’s miracles, includes at least a dozen miraculous cures of leprosy at Becket’s tomb. If Brenner could have discussed these miracles, which, at the very least, suggest that medieval people’s view of leprosy was more complicated than Brenner admits, her study could have connected the more popular aspects of Becket’s cult with its dynastic or elite elements. Despite this neglected aspect of Becket’s cult, this volume enriches our understanding of the multiple meanings and diverse uses of Becket’s prodigious afterlife. Joseph Creamer, State University of New York, Albany Siegfried Wenzel, Of Sins and Sermons. (Synthema 10.) Leuven: Peeters, 2015. Paper. Pp. xiii, 430. €84. ISBN: 978-90-429-3174-9. doi:10.1086/698436 This anthology of eighteen articles illustrates Siegfried Wenzel’s research, rigorously developed over half a century or so. Familiar with the sources and aware of the challenges they present as to their interpretation, he introduces us here into the world of the philologist. How can we penetrate the culture of orality by looking at written texts? Are these reliable witnesses to the way people shared knowledge and experimented in the sphere of religious and cultural communication? Answering these questions requires a raft of competences, as David d’Avray notes in a brilliant foreword, a dense but more than adequate introduction to the riches of this book: a perfect exemplar of the kind of efficiency which Wenzel himself appreciates whenever he looks at a medieval manuscript and discovers a suggestive prologue. After looking at treatises dealing with the seven deadly sins, the practice of preaching is considered in various contexts, especially in England at the end of the Middle Ages. The first four articles lay the foundations of Wenzel’s thought processes. The first (1968), enriched here by a commented list of later publications, draws up a comprehensive program of research, based on the perception that the deadly sins were by no means a topic of interest confined to the scholarly world—on the contrary, they captured the attention of writers and artists, had a special importance in religious literature, and became familiar to many people thanks to pastoral activity. The three following articles discuss methods of dissemination, through manuscripts (the complex tradition of William Perault’s Summa vitiorum appears in constant mutation due to “a drastic reworking” [46]), through preaching (the list of the seven deadly sins, however, is often replaced by the shorter enumeration of “the three enemies of man”—another topic that Wenzel meticulously explored in 1967, in a superb article published in Mediaeval Studies which might well have taken its place in this anthology), or through the regular practice of confession, since the catalogue of vices is one of the references (but not the only one) for the examination of conscience. All the other articles (four-fifths of the total) deal with traces of preaching that have survived in written form. They present an excellent panorama of the problems posed by the documentation, which is heterogeneous and usually anonymous, compiled without any order but in a disarming mixture of languages and styles, and preserved in manuscripts that are often written without care, to the point of being hardly legible. Little series of studies have been discreetly built, always centered on England: preaching in the universities (chaps. 6–8), sermones de sanctis (chaps. 9–10), discourses produced in a “heretic” milieu (but sometimes integrated into an orthodox setting and circulating as such, instead of being considered as the “bad,” something opposed to the good) (chaps. 12–13), and sermons of the Dominican friars (chaps. 14–18). The main challenge is to arrive at the right interpretation of the texts. Is it relevant to build a taxonomy (see chap. 5) when faced with a complex and fluid reality, where, for instance, academic sermons are an exercise for the faculty of theology but also for the faculty of arts, Speculum 93/3 (July 2018)