as Linguatonans—thundering tongue. About 500 of
his sermons survive. He is credited with the division of
the Bible into more or less its present chapters; he was
well known for his corrections to the text; and he com-
mented on most of the Bible according to both the literal
and spiritual senses. His commentaries circulated in a
number of forms, some with only one sense, some with
both. He also wrote commentaries on Peter Comestor’s
Historia scholastica.
While in Paris, he was a close friend of Lothar of
Segni, who as Pope Innocent III made him a cardi-
nal in 1206. In December 1206, Stephen was elected
archbishop of Canterbury; but owing to disputes over
his election between King John Lackland and the Can-
terbury chapter (backed by Innocent III), he was not
allowed to take his seat until 1213. Until then, he lived
in exile at the abbey of Pontigny.
Stephen was closely involved with Magna Carta and
may have been its author. He worked hard to maintain
the role of mediator during the events that led to 1215
and saw the charter not as innovation but as restate-
ments of the rights and duties of kingship. Innocent
read Langton’s mediation with the barons as an indirect
challenge to himself and suspended him as archbishop
for two years. The dispute was eventually settled by the
deaths of John and Innocent, and Stephen returned to
England in 1218.
He attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215
and was very much in sympathy with its reforming
principles. Back in England, he avidly pursued church
reform, holding the fi rst provincial council to legislate
in England in 1222 in Oxford. He himself was active in
administration of his see. He presided over the transla-
tion of the relics of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in
- He played a major role in the coronation of the
boy-king Henry III (1220) and became his adviser. He
died in Sussex in 1228.
See also Innocent III, Pope; John; Peter Comestor;
Peter the Chanter
Further Reading
Stephen Langton. Commentary on the Book of Chronicles, ed. Av-
rom Saltman. Ramat-Gan:Bar-Ilan University Press, 1978.
——. Der Sentenzenkommentar des Kardinals Stephan Lang-
ton, ed. Artur Michael Landgraf. Münster: Aschendorff,
1952.
——. Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton, ed. Phyllis Barzillay
Roberts. Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
1980.
Baldwin, John W. Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social
Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970, Vol. 1, pp. 25–31.
Longère, Jean. Œuvres oratoires de maîtres parisiens au XIIe
siècle: étude historique et doctrinale. Paris: Études Augus-
tiniennes, 1975.
Powicke, Frederick Maurice. Stephen Langton: Being the Ford
Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in Hilary Term- Oxford: Clarendon, 1928.
Roberts, Phyllis Barzillay. “Master Stephen Langton Preaches to
the People and Clergy: Sermon Texts from Twelfth-Century
Paris.” Traditio 36 (1980): 237–68.
——. Stephanus de Lingua-Tonante: Studies in the Sermons of
Stephen Langton. Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1968.
Lesley J. Smith
STOSS, VEIT (ca. 1445/1450–1533)
The famed sculptor was born in Horb am Neckar and
died in Nuremberg on September 20, 1533. Virtually no
documentation exists about Stoss’s training and earlier
years. His earliest secure sculptures show his familiar-
ity with the heightened realism of the art of Nikolaus
Gerhaert and Martin Schongauer, suggesting a stay on
the Upper Rhine, perhaps in Strasbourg. Rogier van
der Weyden’s paintings, likely through other artistic
intermediaries, also infl uenced the young sculptor. Al-
though scholars have suggested the Stoss collaborated
on altarpieces in Rothenburg (1466) and Nördlingen,
nothing is known about his very earliest production. He
certainly was an established sculptor when, in 1477, he
moved to Kraków from Nuremberg, where he had mar-
ried before 1476. Between 1477 and 1489 he created the
Mary Altarpiece for St. Mary’s in Kraków. Measuring
13.95 × 10.68 meters, this is probably the period’s larg-
est winged retable. Several of the apostles in the Death
and Coronation of the Virgin in the corpus are about 2.8
meters tall. Here and in the relief scenes of the inner
and outer wings, Stoss provides his fi gures with little
space. Most are located within a shallow stage with a
sharply tilted ground plane. Stoss’s virtuosity in cutting
highly animated draperies with deep, crisp folds is best
observed in the richly polychromed (multicolored) and
gilt corpus statues. For a project of this magnitude, the
artist employed several assistants likely including a few
of his seven sons. The Mary Altarpiece, the red marble
Tomb of King Casimir IV Jagiello (1492) in Wawel
Cathedral in Kraków, and his cast bronze Tomb Plate
of Callimachus (Filippo Buonaccorsi, d. 1496) in the
city’s Dominican Church, among other works, exerted
a tremendous infl uence on other artists active in Poland
and eastern Prussia.
In 1496 Stoss moved back to Nuremberg. Three years
later he completed stone statues of the Man of Sorrows
and Mater Dolorosa plus three reliefs of the Last Supper,
Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the Arrest of Christ
that patrician Paulus Volckamer set in the eastern choir
wall of St. Sebaldus church. The emotional appeal of
the fi gures, notably Christ and Mary, who look beseech-
ingly at the viewers passing in the ambulatory, coupled
with a growing clarity of form defi ne Stoss’s more
developed style. His career, however, was temporarilySTOSS, VEIT