"Unworthy Servants": The Rhetoric of Resignation at Canterbury, 1070–1170

Medieval attempts to resign episcopal office hold many complexities: legal issues, religious ramifications, and the personal motivations behind such acts. Taken at face value, appeals to resign appear direct and explicit; bishops desire release from an office they feel unworthy to hold, or in which they feel they have accomplished little. On closer scrutiny, however, many of these texts reveal purposes quite apart from resignation. Indeed, the attempts of three archbishops of Canterbury to resign office in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveal strikingly similar rhetorical devices that indicate less a desire to leave office than to bolster the archbishops' spiritual authority. The requests of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Thomas Becket employ language designed to reinforce episcopal centrality at times when kings and even popes dis-regarded its importance, at least in the eyes of these archbishops. Despite the differ-ing circumstances that gave rise to each appeal for resignation, the stylized discourse in all of them suggests a need to make specific points that would rouse support for or bolster the perception of the requestor's episcopal status. All three archbishops, as well as their chroniclers or biographers, saw issues of Canterbury's leadership in the spiritual life of England at stake, and resignation became the means to pro-mote and advance the episcopal cause. By bringing repeated phrases of unworthiness or lack of accomplishment into their appeals for resignation, each man sought a response that would reassure him of his worthiness and ability to lead Canterbury.