Thomas Bradwardine

Thomas Bradwardine
Archbishop of Canterbury
Appointed	4 June 1349
Term ended	26 August 1349
Predecessor	John de Ufford
Successor	Simon Islip
Orders
Consecration	19 July 1349
Personal details
Born	c. 1300 Chichester or Hartfield
Died	26 August 1349 Canterbury
Buried	Canterbury
Education	Merton College, Oxford

Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1300 – 26 August 1349) was an English cleric, scholar, mathematician, physicist, courtier and, very briefly, Archbishop of Canterbury. As a celebrated scholastic philosopher and doctor of theology, he is often called Doctor Profundus, (medieval epithet, meaning "the Profound Doctor").

Bradwardine was born in Sussex either at Hartfield or at Chichester, where his family were settled, members of the smaller gentry or burghers.

Bradwardine was a precocious student, educated at Balliol College, Oxford where he was a fellow by 1321; he took the degree of doctor of divinity, and acquired the reputation of a profound scholar, a skillful mathematician and an able theologian. He was also a gifted logician with theories on the insolubles and in particular the liar paradox.

Bradwardine subsequently moved to Merton College, Oxford on a fellowship. He was afterwards raised to the high offices of chancellor of the university and professor of divinity. Bradwardine (like his contemporary William of Occam) was a culminating figure of the great intellectual movement at Oxford that had begun in the 1240s.

Bradwardine was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him intellectual freedom but deprived him of the security and wherewithal that the Preaching Orders would have afforded; instead he turned to royal patronage. From being chancellor of the diocese of London as Dean of St Paul's, he became chaplain and confessor to Edward III, whom he attended during his wars in France at the Battle of Crécy, where he preached at the victory Mass, and at the subsequent siege of Calais. Edward repeatedly entrusted him with diplomatic missions. On his return to England, he was successively appointed prebendary of Lincoln and dean (1348). In 1349 the canons of the chapter at Canterbury elected him Archbishop following the death of Archbishop John Stratford, but Edward III withheld his consent, preferring his chancellor John de Ufford, perhaps loth to lose his trusted confessor. After Ufford died of the Black Death, 2 May, Bradwardine went to receive confirmation from Pope Clement VI at Avignon, but on his return he died of the plague at Rochester on 26 August 1349, forty days after his consecration. He was buried at Canterbury.

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