The Art of Community at Saint Victor: Practice and Influence, 1108-1265

This is a study of how the canons of Saint Victor thought about and practised ideas of community. Frequently analysed primarily as a 'school', this thesis argues that such a prism obscures important aspects of Saint Victor and its members. The Victorines articulated a distinctive way of thinking about community which mediated between individual and communal wills using daily habits, communal spaces, and visual devices to create a unique intellectual community. This thesis makes two substantial interventions, then, in two often distinct historiographies. The first relates to communal life and how we think about the interactions between ‘individual’ and ‘community’ in this period. This involves thinking about how people wanted to be in the world and how they structured their daily lives in ways that were spiritually and emotionally nourishing. I present this in response to a general perception that the twelfth century witnessed a turn towards interiority. I show that thinking about ‘individual’ and ‘community’ occurred connectedly, not just simultaneously. The second concerns a persistent teleology which plots a transition from schools in the twelfth century to universities in the thirteenth. This model—along with the complementary ‘monastic’ and ‘scholastic’ paradigm—is subtly homogenising, but it is also substantially disfiguring. Locating plural groupings and institutions under the rubric of ‘schools’ ultimately obscures more than it reveals and speaks more to a desire for explanatory ease than it does accuracy or illumination. I propose instead the concept of ‘intellectual community’ to make sense of Saint Victor on this landscape. By reframing the Victorines as sophisticated theorists and practitioners of community, this thesis allows us to reassess the educational landscape of twelfth-century Paris, revealing a diversity of intellectual communities. This forms the foundation for a broader re-consideration in the final chapter of where these ideas ended up, looking towards the Dominicans and engaging with the vexed question of a ‘monasticisation of the laity’.