Alain de Lille

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Alain de Lille

(älăN` də lēl), c.1128–c.1202, French scholastic philosopher, a Cistercian, honored by his contemporaries as the Universal Doctor. He was born in Lille; he taught at Paris and Montpellier before retiring to Cîteaux. Alain attempted to give rational support to the tenets of Christian faith in his writings. He held that the mind unaided by revelation can know the universe, but by faith alone can man know God. Although his thought was largely Neoplatonic, he made use of numerous Aristotelian and neo-Pythagorean elements. The mathematical and deductive method had an important place in the working out of his theology. One of his chief works, De fide catholica contra haereticos, was written in order to refute heretics and unbelievers. Alain de Lille was also one of the foremost didactic poets of his day; his chief poem Anticlaudian (tr. 1935) is a complicated allegory. He is also called Alanus de Insulis, the Latin form of his name.
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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.
Authority and Imitation: A Study of the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris
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.
Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Dante: Il paradigma intellettuale. Un 'inventio' degli anni fiorentini
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.
Newman, Barbara, Frauenlob's Song of Songs. A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece
Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things.
Sweeney, Eileen C. 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.
Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain
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.
Les Paraboles maistre Alain en francoys
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.
Giuliana Carugati. Il ragionare della carne: Dall'anima mundi a Beatrice
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.
Increasing suspicion about Browning's Grammarian
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.
God and the Goddesses
Susan Schibanoff mixes text analysis with queer theories in examining the grammatical techniques used by Alan of Lille to denounce male same-sex relations.
Queering the Middle Ages
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.
The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology
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.
Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio amantis

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