The High Medieval Era · 1108-1246 · Paris and beyond
Canons Regular / Victorine School
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About This Movement
Canons regular were clergy who lived in community under a rule — usually the Rule of St Augustine. But who, unlike monks, kept working in the world: serving churches, running hospitals, teaching. The most influential of their houses was the abbey of Saint-Victor on the left bank of Paris, where the master William of Champeaux withdrew from the schools in 1108 and where his successors built a way of learning that refused to choose between the classroom and the cloister. Hugh of St Victor argued in the Didascalicon that every art and science, rightly ordered, leads toward wisdom; Richard of St Victor mapped the stages of contemplation more carefully than anyone in the Latin West had yet done. Adam of St Victor wrote the sequences the abbey sang. The school's line ran down to Thomas Gallus, who died in 1246, and the abbey itself no longer stands.
Sources
- Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon (trans. Jerome Taylor, Columbia, 1961; newer trans. Harkins in Victorine Texts in Translation) (primary) — The school's program: all the arts ordered to wisdom.
- Richard of St Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity (trans. Grover Zinn, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1979) (primary) — Contemplative theology built on communal reading.
- Liber ordinis Sancti Victoris (the abbey's customary) (primary) — The abbey's customary: offices, discipline, and hospitality set out in daily detail. Available only in Latin (CCCM 61), with no English translation.
- Victorine Texts in Translation (ed. Feiss et al., New City Press/Brepols, multi-volume) (primary) — Modern annotated corpus incl. Hugh on love and formation and Adam of St Victor's liturgical sequences - the school's sung, ordinary face.
- Paul Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor (OUP, 2009) (secondary) — Standard one-volume entry to the school.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 4 (McGuire); cf. ch. 5 'The theological framework' (L. Smith) (reference)