John of Salisbury c. 1110 – 1180

John of Salisbury was an English humanist scholar, secretary to two archbishops of Canterbury including the martyred Thomas Becket, and finally bishop of Chartres. After studies under Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers in the schools of Paris and Chartres, he produced the Policraticus, the first medieval Latin treatise of political philosophy in the West, and the Metalogicon, a spirited defense of the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric against contemporary obscurantism. His correspondence is one of the richest sources for the political and intellectual history of twelfth-century Europe.

John of Salisbury was born around 1110 at Old Sarum near Salisbury into a modest English family. He went to Paris in 1136 and spent twelve years among the most distinguished masters of the new schools, hearing Peter Abelard on the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, Robert of Melun, Gilbert of Poitiers, and the Chartrian masters Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches; he then entered the household of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, as secretary in 1147 and from 1162 served the new archbishop Thomas Becket, at whose murder in Canterbury cathedral on 29 December 1170 he was an eyewitness. He spent his last years from 1176 as bishop of Chartres.

His works are the Metalogicon (1159) on the trivium and the defence of the liberal arts, the Policraticus (1159) on the courtier and the Christian commonwealth, the Historia Pontificalis on the papal court of Eugene III, the long didactic poem Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, the Vita Sancti Anselmi, the Vita Sancti Thomae of his martyred friend, and a corpus of more than three hundred letters.

John combined a deep classical reading of Cicero, Seneca, and the Roman historians with the new logical learning of Paris and a moderate Augustinian theology. The Policraticus is the first medieval treatise on political ethics, describing the body politic as an organism, distinguishing the just king from the tyrant, and articulating an explicit doctrine of tyrannicide. He died at Chartres in October 1180.