Bibliography

Backhouse, Janet and Christopher de Hamel
    1988  The Becket Leaves.  London: The British Library.

 This book tells a little about the actual manuscript of the leaves and their possible artist.  It also contains color plates of each of the leaves.  However, there is only a paragraph or two explaining what is actually going on in each picture, and there is no translation of the text.

Barlow, Frank
    1986  Thomas Becket.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

The definitive biography these days.

Butler, John
    1995  The Quest for Becket's Bones.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

No one knows for sure what happened to Becket's bones once Henry VIII's men had been through Canterbury.  This book examines the possibilities, especially a skeleton found in the cathedral in the nineteenth century.  (It wasn't him.)  Fun to read, especially if you like mysteries.

Godefroy, Frédéric
    1978  Lexique de l'ancien français.  Paris: Editions Champion.

The lexicon of Old French that I used when I needed help in my translation.

Meyer, Paul
    1885  Fragments d'une vie de Saint Thomas de Cantorbéry.  Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot et C^ie.

A reprint edition from the sixties also exists.  I'm not sure how easy it is to find, but college libraries may have it (that's where I found the one I used).  This is the only edition of the text of the leaves, and it's the book I relied on for the old French text here.  There's no translation, but there are marginal glosses summing up and clarifying various sections.  A good part of the book is also devoted to history and background.  However, in case you couldn't tell by the title, you have to know French to read it.

Urry, William
    1999  Thomas Becket: His Last Days.  Frome, Somerset, Great Britain: Sutton Publishing Limited.

This is a fascinating book that is both informative and fun to read.  After some background information, it focuses on the last few days of Becket's life, even down to precisely what was said in various conversations and exactly what the archbishop was wearing when he died.  One of my favorites.