EADMER OF CANTERBURY

Benedictine monk, historian, theologian, biographer of St. Anselm; b. in or near Canterbury, c. 1060; d. Canterbury, c. 1130. He entered Christ Church, Canterbury, as a child and experienced the transformation in monastic life that took place under the inspiration of Archbishop lanfranc. When anselm became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, he made Eadmer his chaplain. The two men were never separated until Anselm's death in 1109. During their years together Eadmer acted as a secretary and amanuensis of the archbishop; above all he recorded Anselm's sayings, took notes for a history of his times, the Historia novorum, and began to write the Vita s. Anselmi. Meanwhile he continued his hagiographical work for the church of Canterbury and began a series of devotional writings in the manner of St. Anselm. In 1120 Eadmer was nominated as bishop of St. Andrews, but he left his see after several months of fruitless argument about the rights of Canterbury over the Scottish church. He spent his last years at Canterbury in the office of precentor, in which he continued to serve his church as a hagiographer and devotional writer. The most important work of these years was his Tractatus de conceptione sanctae Mariae, which contains the first theological defense of the doctrine of the immaculate conception and foreshadows in a remarkable way some of the later arguments on this theme. Eadmer's main claim to fame is undoubtedly as a historian and biographer of St. Anselm. He was the first notable English historian after bede, and as a biographer he showed a talent for vivid and intimate delineation of character seldom surpassed in the Middle Ages.

Bibliography: General works collected in Patrologia Latina 158:49–118; 159:301–318, 347–580, 587–606, 709–812. Devotional works, ed. a. wilmart in Revue des sciences religieuses 15 (1935) 184–219, 354–379. Editions. Tractatus de conceptione sanctae Mariae, ed. h. thurston and t. slater (Freiburg 1904); The Life of St. Anselm, ed. and tr. r. w. southern (New York 1962); History of Recent Events in England, tr. g. bosanquet (London 1964). For a study of his works as a whole and of his relationship with St. Anselm, see r. w. southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge, Eng. 1963).

[r. w. southern]