From Knowledge to Beatitude: St Victor, Twelfth-Century Scholars, and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr ed. by E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (review)

Grover Zinn, Jr has played a key role in promoting a renewal of interest in the intellectual and religious culture of St Victor, at least within the English-speaking world. The publication of this volume is thus a fitting tribute to his achievement, in drawing together a distinguished range of contributors, some of whom work directly on Victorine authors, while others consider contemporaries, directly or indirectly influenced by their achievement. Contributions to Festschriften often suffer from being excessively specialised. While this is the case with certain of the contributions in this collection, others introduce important themes generic to medieval Victorine culture. The words 'and beyond' in the title allow certain contributions to wander considerably beyond the twelfth century. Their common theme is sympathy for a Victorine mystical outlook of huge influence on medieval religious thought.

The first contributions in this volume focus directly on art and architecture, some in quite a specialist vein. Thus Catherine Delano-Smith examines the depictions of the maps of the Holy Land and of the Temple within the numerous surviving manuscripts of the commentary by Richard of St Victor on Ezekiel. Richard was fascinated by the description of the Temple given by Ezekiel. The consistency of designs in these manuscripts leads us to think they were integral to the work from the outset. Of particular interest is the possibility that Richard was drawing on designs preserved in Rashi's commentaries on scripture, or alluded to within his writings. This is also the case with the map of Canaan. After Richard, Nicholas of Lyra in the early fourteenth century preserved this tradition of visual commentary in relation to Ezekiel. While this study does not examine the content of Richard's exegesis, we do learn about his fascination with the visual imagery of the Bible.

An essay by Walter Cahn on an illuminated manuscript of the writings of Hugh of St Victor (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 729) is similarly descriptive in focus, examining the work of an illuminator in the mid-twelfth century, fascinated by the personifications implicit in Hugh's work. A more useful opening to the volume might have been William W. Clark's essay on the twelfth-century church of St Victor, a building largely known only from surviving drawings. Oddly, Clark seems unaware of the entry in the necrology about the church being built in the time of Bishop Girbert (Gilbert), namely 1117-24. He offers stylistic arguments for assigning the beginning of the church to 1135-40. The paper by Thomas Waldman, on the 1131 privilege of Innocent II for St Denis, has nothing to do with St Victor, but presents Suger as himself writing the papal privilege to proclaim the grandeur of his ambition for a newly constructed church.

Franklin T. Harkins offers a synthetic essay on the role of reading at St Victor that provides an easier entrée into Victorine studies than the earlier art historical contributions. His theme is that Hugh transforms the ancient theme of philosophy as a way of life by setting it within the context of scripture. Whereas some readings of Hugh focus on his interest in the historical level of scripture, others (like Harkins) take the tropological goal as its defining characteristic, in this case drawing on the De institutione novitiorum.The novice was taught to reflect on the historia of scripture, not for its own sake but to become himself spiritually transformed. Lesley Smith provides a focused study of the large collection of glosses of books of the Bible given by a non-Victorine master, Robert Amiclas, to the Augustinian abbey of Buildwas. In more spiritual mode, Hugh Feiss reflects on the broader theme of preaching by word and example in...