Thierry de Chartres

Master at Chartres and at Paris, Thierry defended Peter Abelard in 1121, became chancellor of Chartres in 1142, then took part in the Council of Reims in 1148, which called into question Gilbert de la Porrée’s doctrine of the Trinity. Toward the end of his life, he became a Cistercian monk and died after 1155. Thierry composed the Heptateuchon, an encyclopedic florilegia that synthesizes the master’s teaching on the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (trivium); arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy (quadrivium). He also commented on various logical and rhetorical texts of the ancients (Aristotle, Cicero) as well as the theological treatises of Boethius. He meditated on the mystery of the Trinity, using arithmetical considerations, and discussed the beginning of the book Genesis in order to reconcile the words of Scripture with contemporary knowledge of physics.