A critical edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus Books I-IV

Abstract

This thesis is part of a commitment to re-edit all eight books of John of Salisbury's great treatise on politics for the Oxford University Press. The last edition, and the first critical edition, was that of C C J Webb (Oxford, 1909), which has since been accepted as the definitive text. My own examination of the manuscripts (which has been palaeographical and codicological as well as critical) has totally controverted that view and has enabled me to establish a text that, although still not perfect, represents the text as the author himself wrote it more exactly than any of the ten editions published to date. John's Policraticus, Metalogicon, Letters, and unfinished Historia Pontificalis, are used by historians as primary sources for the politics and education of the day, so that this thesis is the first stage of an enterprise that will greatly benefit the many mediaevalists and their students to whose work the Policraticus is of central or major concern.