BOSO. - English cardinal, died in Rome around 1178. In the drafting of the papal biographies, as a continuation of the original nucleus of the Liber Pontificalis, B. succeeds the Anacletian cardinal Pandolfo. A Benedictine monk of St. Albans, when his uncle, Nicholas Breakspear, was created cardinal, he entered the Curia in France under Eugene III as apostolic writer. He followed his uncle on the legation to Scandinavia; by him, who had become pope under the name Adrian IV, he was appointed chamberlain, then in 1155 cardinal deacon of Sts. Cosmas and Damian and legate a latere in England. After Adrian's death, he was an active and fervent supporter of the election of Alexander III, whom he also backed with arms, securing possession of Castel Sant'Angelo. By the new Pope he was transferred to the presbyteral title of St. Pudentiana. He took part in the struggle between Alexander and Barbarossa and was among the negotiators of the peace of Anagni and among those present at the Convention of Venice in 1177. He then returned with the Pope to Rome, ending there shortly afterwards his busy life. In his activity as a historian, which is above all what his memory rests on, two distinct phases must be distinguished: the one shows him as a flat, bare and uniform compiler of biographies, modeled on the ancient ones, from Stephen VI to Innocenzo II; the other presents far greater interest, in that it sets out to illustrate pontificates of which he had been a witness and in which he too had often acted as a protagonist (and this holds especially for the lives of Eugene III, Adrian IV and Alexander III). The latter, which has come down to us unfinished owing to the author's death, is of particular interest for the vastness and completeness of its information; the style too becomes animated and rises in it. He also composed certain metrical lives of saints.
Bibliography5 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo