(ca. 1010–1089). Born into a good family in Pavia, Lanfranc was educated in that city and more generally in northern Italy. He left Italy for France while still a young man and made his reputation as an itinerant teacher in the area around Avranches. In 1042, he entered the new monastery at Bec (founded 1041); he was abbot of Saint-Étienne, Caen, in 1063; in 1070, he was made archbishop of Canterbury. He had a dual reputation, first as a teacher and scholar and later as a brilliant administrator and leader.
His scholarship falls into two periods, before and after his entry into Bec. The earlier works, no longer extant, are on the Trivium; after 1042, he devoted himself to theology, writing commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline epistles that circulated widely. About 1063, he wrote a treatise De sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi, against the opinions of Berengar of Tours’s De eucharistia, and to which Berengar replied in De sacra coena. Berengar’s ideas caused widespread antagonism and were finally condemned by Pope Gregory VII in 1079. The issue centers on the changes taking place in the bread and wine of the eucharist in order for them to become the body and blood of Christ. Both Berengar and Lanfranc believed in the Real Presence, but they differed on the necessity and type of any change in the elements, Berengar insisting that no material alteration was needed and Lanfranc arguing for outward identity concealing inner grace. The question was compounded by difficulties of language: no clearer statement of the central issue was to be possible until the introduction of Aristotelian notions of substance and accident in the 13th century.
Lanfranc’s leadership of the school at Bec made it into one of the most famous of its day, and pupils included Anselm of Bec, Ivo of Chartres, and Guitmund of Aversa (later Pope Alexander II). He was a valued counselor to Duke William of Normandy (the Conqueror) despite having declared William’s marriage invalid.
Lanfranc was a great holder of synods (in 1075, 1076, 1078, 1081), which he used to promulgate canon law, and he was the first to create separate courts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. His legal turn of mind (he seems to have practiced or at least studied civil law in Pavia) was coupled with a traditionalist viewpoint, so that his outlook reminds us of Carolingian attitudes and practices rather than any innovation. The collection of canon law, the so-called Col-lectio Lanfranci, which Lanfranc brought to Canterbury from Bec, has an old-fashioned cast, in contrast to the Collection in Seventy-Four Titles (Diversorum patrum sen-tentiae) or Ivo of Chartres’s Panormia and other legal works, the new breed of legal collections that it seems Lanfranc preferred to ignore.
As archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc replaced many Saxon bishops with Normans, to the displeasure of some in the English church, but in doing so he increased ties with the Continent and with Gregory VII’s reforms, with which, at least in the area of the moral reform of the church, he was largely in sympathy. Lanfranc rebuilt the church at Canterbury and established its library. He reestablished many of the old monastic privileges and lands.
