Herbert of Bosham often complained that he was unappreciated. But how can one properly appreciate someone who advised Thomas Becket and rebuked Henry II to his face, who wrote a Life of Becket that is unlike any contemporary work of hagiography or history, whose theological expertise and ambition led him to produce one of the most visually arresting illuminated Bible books of his age and who also happened to be one of the most skilled Christian Hebraists of the Middle Ages?

Not that Herbert made it easy on himself. His stance on church–crown relations was sometimes so intemperate that Thomas Becket had to rein him in. When the church sought reconciliation with Henry II after Becket's murder, Herbert continued to rail against both king and ecclesiastics. While others who knew Thomas much less well were writing Lives of the saint amid the glow of martyrdom, Herbert was writing a work in honour of Peter Lombard just at the time that Peter's work was being condemned as heretical. When Herbert finally wrote a Life of St Thomas, a decade and a half later, he ignored the miracles that still drew crowds to Thomas's tomb at Canterbury, and focused on the cause for which he had died, thus reopening wounds that others had chosen to soothe. Though a learned and inventive theologian, Herbert never wrote a full-length work of theology. Instead he buried his proofs of the existence of God and his disquisitions on mystic theology in the middle of the Liber Melorum, a celebration of the concordances between Christ and St Thomas that has remained largely unread to this day. Herbert's letter collection, apparently put together by his own hand, does not include any correspondence between the mid-1170s and the late 1180s, a period of his life about which we have hardly any information from any source. And we would not have known that Herbert apparently had a better grasp of Hebrew than any known western Christian contemporary, were it not for the discovery in the middle of the twentieth century of a work written in obscure exile at the end of his life.

Herbert presents other problems for those who seek to approach his work today. The scholarly, linguistic and cultural challenges that face anyone who seeks to grapple with the world of a twelfth-century intellectual are compounded by the erudition, originality and range that he displays.