Eadmer, precentor of Canterbury and historian, b. 1064 (?); d. 1124 (?). Brought up at Christ Church ab infantia, he became after St. Anselm’s consecration, in 1079, his intimate companion. After Anselm’s death his chief occupation was writing. He had made notes of the saint’s doings and discourses and of the affairs in which he had been engaged, and from these he compiled his chief works, the “Historia Novorum” and the “Vita §. Anselmi” (ed. M. Rule, 1884, in Rolls Series). Eadmer’s “Opuscula” comprise verses on Sts. Dunstan and Edward, the lives of Sts. Wilfrid, Odo, Dunstan, Oswald, Bregwin (printed in Wharton, Anglia Sancta). Of his theological works the most noteworthy is the “De conceptione Sanct Marie”, a tract of much importance for the development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (see Thurston’s ed., Freiburg, 1904, and “The Month”, July and August, 1904, for the discussion of the date of his death). In 1121 he was elected to the See of St. Andrews, but by refusing to be ordained except by the Archbishop of York, he put an insuperable bar to his own promotion.
Notices of this important writer are found in all treatises on English and on ecclesiastical writers. Besides the works cited above, see: LinBeRMANN, Ungedruckte anglo-normannische Geschichtsquellen (Strasburg, 1879); Raary, Eadmer (Paris, 1892).
J. H. Pollen.