Intellectual community in Saint Victor: 1108–c.1200

This article examines the community of Saint Victor in the twelfth century and argues the dangers of considering intellectual life and communal life as two distinct things. It responds critically to the tendency to separate the two by canalizing intellectual activities into the model of a ‘school’. This article suggests instead the importance of thinking of Saint Victor as an ‘intellectual community’. The immediate significance for Victorine studies lies in thinking more imaginatively about the relationship between the ‘ideas’ which are rightly famous and the community which remains strangely anonymous. Beyond Saint Victor, this approach disrupts a much broader historiographical landscape of ‘cathedral schools’, ‘the university’ and twelfth-and-thirteenth-century Paris. What emerges is a city that played host to experimentation, both in ideas and the ways that communal life could be organized to facilitate their exchange and development.