John Edward Courtenay Bodley (6 June 1853 – 28 May 1925) was an English civil servant, known for his writings on France.

He was the son of the pottery owner Edward Fisher Bodley (1815–1881),^[1] and his wife Mary Ridgway Bodley, and brother of the pottery owner Edwin James Drew Bodley.^[2] He was educated at Mill Hill School and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1873 to 1876.^[3] An active Freemason, he approached Oscar Wilde, then also an undergraduate, and introduced him to a Masonic Lodge in Oxford.^[4] Richard Ellmann^[5] attributes to Bodley a long, spiteful New York Times article that appeared on Wilde, on 21 January 1882. "Bodelino" was a member of James McNeill Whistler's circle in Paris.^[6]

He was secretary to Charles Dilke, from 1880. Initially Dilke thought him frivolous, but he came to play a major part in Dilke's official work and private life.^[7] He was a witness in the divorce case that broke Dilke's career.^[8] He subsequently believed that Dilke's downfall was caused by Joseph Chamberlain.^[9]

A personal friend of Cardinal Manning ("almost certainly his most intimate non-Catholic friend", and Manning's preferred choice as biographer^[10]), he was his biographer only in a short work.^[11]

Bodley's political writings are in the general tradition of Hippolyte Taine, whom Bodley knew.^[12] When Émile Boutmy, a follower of Taine, had his work on England in the same vein translated into English,^[13] Bodley wrote an introduction.

Shane Leslie, a friend, described him as "one of the last cultured Europeans".^[14] A 1928 work by Charles Maurras about him was entitled L'anglais qui a connu la France;^[15] Maurras had already studied Bodley in 1902, in Deux témoins de la France.

• France (1898, two volumes)^[16]
• L'Anglomanie et les Traditions Françaises (1899)
• The Coronation of Edward the Seventh: A Chapter of European and Imperial History (1903). The official account.
• The Church In France (1906)
• Cardinal Manning; The decay of idealism in France; The Institute of France (1912)
• L'Age Mécanique et le Déclin de l'idéalisme en France (1913)
• The Romance of the Battle-Line in France (1920)

He was a descendant of Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library.^[17] He married Evelyn Frances Bell but they divorced in 1908. His sons were Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley and the artist Josselin Reginald Courtenay Bodley (1893-1974), who were also the joint dedicatees of France. His daughter Ava married Ralph Wigram in 1925,^[18] and John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, in 1941.^[19]

• Shane Leslie (1930), Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley