Gerard la Pucelle
Bishop of Coventry
Gerard la Pucelle (sometimes Gerard Pucelle; c. 1117 – 13 January 1184) was a peripatetic Anglo-French scholar of canon law, clerk, and Bishop of Coventry.
Life
Gerard was possibly born in England, taught canon law at the University of Paris in the 1150s, when the study of the discipline of the Church was first differentiated from theology, spurred by the collections of church decretals that began with the Decretum Gratiani assembled by a monk at the University of Bologna. Among his surviving texts are glosses on the Decretum manuscripts to be found among the manuscripts of Durham Cathedral and glosses in the Summa Lipsiensis, in the Summa Parisiensis, and elsewhere. Gerard added to the standard collection from which he taught. Among his pupils were Lucas of Hungary, Ralph Niger, master Richard, a certain Gervase who retired to Durham, and the English scholar Walter Map.
Gerard was a member of Thomas Becket's entourage, his extended familia, and a close friend of John of Salisbury. After Becket went into exile, Gerard taught for a while in Paris before he undertook a mission to the Empire in 1165/66 even though Frederick Barbarossa was under a ban of excommunication. Between 1165 and 1168 he taught at Cologne, and held a prebend at that city. In 1168 Gerard returned to England and took the oath of fealty to Henry II, which Becket had rejected.
The public source identifies “Gerard la Pucelle” as bishop of Coventry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gerard, Pucelle and Bishop.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3785339. VIAF identifies the subject as 89151247973444270007. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1117, 1184, 1165 and 1168.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerard la Pucelle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.