Baldwin of Forde, Bartholomew of Exeter and the Authorship of the Liber de sectis hereticorum et orthodoxe fidei dogmata

Summary

This paper is a contribution to an ongoing debate about the nature and extent of the writings of Baldwin of Forde, the often-mentioned, but rather less often-studied, abbot of Forde (c. 1175–80), bishop of Worcester (1180–4) and second archbishop of Canterbury (1185–90) after Thomas Becket. The discussion has been conducted almost exclusively in the introductions to scholarly editions of Baldwin's works or occasional journal articles, which serve to amplify them. My somewhat belated intervention in the discussion was prompted by the appearance in 2008 of an edition by José Louis Narvaja of what is purported to be Baldwin of Forde's lost work, the Liber de sectis hereticorum et orthodoxe fidei dogmata, but which I will argue is more likely to have been written by his friend Bartholomew of Exeter (d. 1184).

In short, my paper represents a response to Narvaja's comments in 2008 on Bell's 1984 dismissal of Dom Jean Leclercq's claim in 1963 that the works of Baldwin are ‘assez vaste’ (quite extensive) and many await publication. From this sequence of events it might be thought that scholarship on Baldwin cannot itself be described as ‘assez vaste’ and tends to be prosecuted at long intervals and in far flung places: from Luxemburg to Newfoundland to Argentina and Australia. Two of the three scholars in question, Dom Jean Leclercq and Professor David Bell, of Memorial University, Newfoundland, hardly need an introduction. Not so familiar, however, is the third, Professor José Louis Narvaja. He was the first to identify the text in a Latin manuscript from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which had already been discussed as an anonymous work in studies of the conciliar movement, as that of a lost work by Baldwin. He then published a critical edition of the text in the series ‘Rarissima Mediaeualia’, under the auspices of the Theological Faculty of the St George Institute at Frankfurt. Narvaja is an Argentinian Jesuit and, as it happens, nephew of the present pope.

Let us begin with the statement of Leclercq, found in his introduction to the 1963 edition of Baldwin's De sacramento altaris. When discussing the author and his works Leclercq made the following claim: ‘Baldwin's work is quite extensive.