SOURCE: Andrea, Alfred J. “Walter, Archdeacon of London, and the Historia Occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry.” Church History 50, no. 2 (June 1981): 144-51.

In the following essay, Andrea confirms the validity of Jacques's reference to Master Walter of London, an archdeacon and influential preacher.

Jacques de Vitry's Historia Occidentalis is one of the more remarkable and informative studies of contemporary western Christendom to come out of the thirteenth century.¹ As numerous commentators have pointed out, it is unmistakably the product of the spiritual-intellectual school of Master Peter the Chanter of Paris, who inspired a generation of scholars and churchmen to marry popular preaching with the theology of the schools.² Written early in the third decade of the thirteenth century,³ the Historia Occidentalis analyzes the moral state of the western church and juxtaposes in full relief the modes of both degeneracy and religious renewal within that society. Its thesis is that...