Among specific topics are the city and its schools, poetry and imitation, Platonic themes and variations, medicine and astrology, the purpose of natural science, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the function of integumentum, quotation and imitation, the standard and Laudian glosses, and
Alan of Lille and Peter Lombard.
The critical myth of an exiled Dante who turns from love poetry to philosophy for the first time in the prose of the Convivio is convincingly undermined as Ardizzone demonstrates how these early lyrics, and the Vita nova, were profoundly influenced by intellectual figures such as Cicero, Augustine, Boethius, Gregory the Great,
Alan of Lille, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.
Alan of Lille provides a particularly apposite synthesis of these two traditions, combining Marian reading of the Song of Songs with Platonic respect for natura.
Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and
Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things.
Of especial interest is the evidence presented by Pick to show how Rodrigo and others in Toledo developed a school of thought that owed much to the thinking of Gilbert of Poitiers and those who built on his theological ideas, the so-called Porretani, in particular
Alan of Lille. Pick explains how the assimilation of non-Christian knowledge, which could contribute to a better understanding of truth, was seen by Rodrigo as part of an overall effort to work towards greater Christian unity.
The work presented here is the third translation into French of the Liber parabolarum, a collection of philosophical and moral maxims composed by
Alan of Lille (c.
The first four chapters of Carugati's book treat the various ways in which Plotinus, Bernard of Silvester,
Alan of Lille, and Jean de Meun treat the phenomenon of love, or eros, in the world, its connection to the divine, and its relation to reason.
Thinkers such as
Alan of Lille, who held grammarians responsible for policing deviations in language and who imputed those deviations to a deeper violation of the natural order, reinforced a connection between the policers and the violators.
Along the way, she considers work by Henry of Suso, Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Chaucer, Bernard Silvestris,
Alan of Lille, Hildegard of Bingen, and Dante, to name only the best known, as well as some very interesting images drawn mostly, but not exclusively, from manuscript illustration.
Susan Schibanoff mixes text analysis with queer theories in examining the grammatical techniques used by
Alan of Lille to denounce male same-sex relations.
They vary in genre and purpose: from Raguel's account of the witness of the martyr Pelagius, through
Alan of Lille's The Plaint of Nature (a revisionist gloss on Ovid's Metamorphoses) and the Penitential manuals of Paul of Hungary and Robert of Flambourgh, to Aquinas's Summa theologiae.
It is a privilege to be able to review this very interesting study of John Gower and
Alan of Lille, which has refreshed my understanding not only of the two poems under discussion, but also of the medieval humanistic traditions which may now be mapped out with greater clarity between them.