This volume introduces the career and legacy of Stephen Langton, known for his role as Archbishop of Canterbury in securing the Magna Carta. It shows that his influence as arguably the leading Parisian master of his time has been misunderstood and undervalued.

Stephen Langton, following in the footsteps of Peter Lombard, remade not only medieval theology but also the medieval schools by redoing Jerome's famous prologues to the Latin Bible. An Englishman who went as a lad from near Lincoln to Paris and then returned to England as Archbishop of Canterbury after nearly half a century of learning and teaching, Langton connected Paris, its schools and university, to English schools and universities in ways never before suspected by scholars. It turns out that Langton was not only a great Church leader and diplomat but was arguably the leading English intellectual of his generation, the man at the centre of the greatest developments of his age, from the securing the of Magna Carta to the founding of the University of Paris.