William of Conches

File:William of Conches.jpg

Tonsured William of Conches (, "Master William") teaching the Duke of Normandy that "A thing existing in itself is said to be a substance" () in a medieval copy of the (Beck MS 12, c. 1230)

William of Conches (Template:Langx; Template:Langx; Template:C.), historically sometimes anglicized as William Shelley,Template:Sfnp was a medieval Norman-French scholastic philosopher who sought to expand the bounds of Christian humanism by studying secular works of classical literature and fostering empirical science. He was a prominent (member of the School of Chartres). John of Salisbury, a bishop of Chartres and former student of William's, refers to William as the most talented grammarian of the time, after his former teacher Bernard of Chartres.

Life

File:Eglise Sainte-Foy (Conches-en-Ouche) 11.jpg

Relief of William from his tombstone, originally at St Germanus's Church () in Tilleul but now displayed at St Faith's Church () in Conches-en-Ouche

William was born around 1085Template:SfnpTemplate:Ndash1090Template:Sfnp in a small village near Évreux, Normandy. From his surname, that village is generally taken to have been ConchesTemplate:Sfnp although it was possibly nearby Tilleul instead, the location of his later grave.Template:SfnpTemplate:Efn At the time, Normandy was still uneasily controlled by Norman England in notional homage to France. William studied under Bernard of Chartres in Chartres, Blois, and became a leading member of the School of Chartres, early ScholasticsTemplate:Sfnp who formed part of the 12th-century Renaissance. Less focused on Aristotle and medieval dialectic than Peter Abelard and his students at the University of Paris, the Chartrians primarily aimed to reconcile Christian morality and legend with Platonic philosophy, chiefly with reference to the Book of Genesis and Plato's Timaeus.Template:Sfnp

William began teaching around 1115Template:SfnpTemplate:Ndash1120Template:Sfnp and was primarily based in Paris and Chartres.Template:SfnpTemplate:Efn He composed his around the period 1125 to 1130.Template:Sfnp He taught John of Salisbury at Chartres in 1137 and 1138, and John later considered him the most accomplished grammarian of his timeTemplate:Sfnp or just after his master Bernard.Template:Efn John describes his method of teaching in detail, noting it followed Bernard and both followed Quintilian's .Template:Sfnp There were lectures on classical with questions on parsing, scansion, and composition. Students practiced writing prose and poetry on classical models and undertook frequent discussion on set subjects with the aim of developing fluency and cultivating elegant diction.Template:Sfnp William of St. Thierry, who had previously encouraged Bernard of Clairvaux to prosecute Abelard, wrote another letter to the same cleric "on the errors of William of Conches" () in 1141,Template:Sfnp complaining of the modalist view of the Trinity implicit in the .Template:Sfnp William had not explicitly upheld with Bernard Sylvestris that Plato's "world soul" (Template:Langx; Template:Langx, Template:Translit) was essentially identical with the Holy Spirit, but had discussed the idea as a possibly valid reading.Template:Sfnp With Abelard's writings successfully condemned by Bernard at the Council of Sens for a litany of heresies the same year, William withdrew from public teaching.Template:Sfnp William's exemption from prosecution alongside his production of more orthodox revisions of some of his previous works, his departure from public teaching, and the bitterness of some of his discussion of clerics in his later works is suggestive of a compromise worked out between Bernard and his friend the papal legate Geoffroy de Lèves, who as bishop of Chartres would have overseen its affiliated school, but there is no explicit surviving record of such an arrangement.Template:Sfnp

William sought the patronage and protection of Geoffrey Plantagenet, the learned and powerful count of Anjou.Template:Sfnp In 1143 or 1144, he became the personal tutor of Geoffrey's son Henry, later King HenryII of England. He also tutored Henry's brothers in the period from 1146 to 1149Template:Sfnp and composed his , a revision of his in the form of a dialogue,Template:Sfnp sometime between 1144 and 1149.Template:Sfnp He dedicated it to Geoffrey.Template:Sfnp There are some hints in his works that he may have resumed teaching, possibly in Paris, during the 1150s but these are inconclusive.Template:Sfnp

He died in 1154Template:Sfnp or shortly afterward,Template:Sfnp probably at Paris or the environs of Évreux.Template:Sfnp The funeral slab with his effigy has been moved from its original location at St Germanus's Church, Tilleul, to St Faith's Church in Conches.Template:Sfnp

Works

The number and attribution of works by William of Conches has been a persistent problem of medieval bibliography,Template:Sfnp as has the inaccuracy of the many manuscripts and editions.Template:Sfnp

It is now certain that William wrote two editions of the encyclopedic ("On the Philosophy of the World"),Template:Sfnp although it was previously variously attributed to Bede,Template:Sfnp William of Hirsau,Template:Sfnp Honorius of Autun,Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp and Hugh of St Victor.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp Likewise, he wrote one edition of the related dialogue ,Template:Sfnp whose neological name has been variously emended to ("A Dramatization")Template:Sfnp and to ("The Business of Philosophy")Template:Sfnp although William himself understood his transliteration of Template:Translit () as meaning an interrogation () or question-and-answer format.Template:Sfnp The continues to be largely considered a bowdlerized or revised edition of the ; however, from the 1980s, scholars have reconsidered this attitude, noting that only about 3Template:Ndash5% of the earlier work was removed against a rough doubling of content, with numerous additional Greek and Arabic sources.Template:Sfnp A "lost" treatise ("The Great Philosophy of Nature"), considered his true masterwork by his early biographers and sometimes still attributed to him,Template:Sfnp was the product of an extensive series of mistakes based on a poor edition of Vincent of Beauvais's Mirror of NatureTemplate:Sfnp that began with an extract from William of Conches's work.Template:Sfnp

William is also credited with numerous glosses on classic texts. He wrote surviving overviews of commentaries on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy () and Plato's Timaeus (); 2 editions of his own commentary on Priscian's Institutes of Grammar (); and one or two editions of commentary on Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (); his other works also mention now-lost commentaries on Martianus Capella's On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury and on Boethius's On Education in Music.Template:Sfnp He was probably responsible for several surviving glosses of Juvenal's Satires and is credited by some with a lost commentary on Vergil's Aeneid.Template:Sfnp He is sometimes still credited as the author of ("Philosophers' Moral Teachings"), the first medieval treatise on philosophical ethics,Template:Sfnp although this attribution is more suspect.Template:Sfnp The gloss of the Gospels () credited to him was either entirely spurious or a misattribution of content from William of Auvergne.Template:Sfnp

William's generally credited works are marked by special attention to cosmology and psychology and were among the first works of medieval Christian philosophy to devote considerable attention to Islamic philosophy and science, using the Latin translations produced by Constantine the African.Template:Sfnp They display the humanism, Platonism, and affinity for the natural sciences of other members of the School of Chartres,Template:Sfnp with whom William shared the tendency of analyzing his source texts through the lens of "covering" or "shielding" () treating any apparent contradictions or heretical content within them as an allegory or metaphor for an underlying accurate and orthodox truth.Template:Sfnp In the passage of Plato's Timaeus stating that souls existed in the stars before birth, William opined that he really meant "nothing heretical, but the most profound philosophy sheltered in the covering of the words". He then glossed Plato's intended meaning as simply noting the accepted importance of astrology on human fate.Template:Sfnp

De Philosophia Mundi

William's chief work appears in manuscript as his Philosophy ()Template:Sfnp but, owing to mistakes in transmission and comprehension, various recensions were published for centuries as Bede's Four Books of the Philosophy of the Elements (),Template:SfnpTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp William of Hirsau's Three Books of Philosophical and Astronomical Instruction (),Template:Sfnp and Honorius of Autun's Four Books on the Philosophy of the World ().Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp A separate recension rediscovered in the 20th century was a Compendium of Philosophy () attributed to Hugh of St Victor.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp The "Honorius" recension being the most complete,Template:Sfnp it has become the general name for the work in modern scholarship.Template:Sfnp The correct title and attribution were finally discovered in 1722 by Remi-Casimir OudinTemplate:Sfnp with additional points and considerations added by Charles Jourdain in 1838Template:Sfnp and Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau in 1858.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp It has also been known as William's Lesser Philosophy ()Template:Sfnp by comparison with the misnamed, miscredited, and misdescribed . More recently, Gregor Maurach produced partial and complete editions of the text compiled from numerous manuscriptsTemplate:SfnpTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp before it was fully realized that William had composed two separate editions, one during his youth and another revised around the time of Bernard's attacks on Abelard and others.Template:Sfnp According to Paul Edward Dutton's tally, 68 manuscripts of the original edition and 16 of the revised edition are currently known to exist.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

The first edition of the was divided into four books,Template:Sfnp covering physics, astronomy, geography, meteorology, and medicine. The revised edition expanded the first book and divided it into three parts, making up six books altogether.Template:Sfnp

William glosses the composition of the world as rooted in the four elements but follows Constantine the African in considering an element "the simplest and minimum part of any body—simple in quality, minimum in quantity".Template:Efn Therefore, he does not identify elemental fire, air, water, or earth with any of the composite forms in which they are experienced by humans.Template:Efn He argues that the pure forms of the elements cannot be perceived but only grasped by reason applied to abstracted division of sensible forms.Template:Efn He considers that these pure elements are defined by their intrinsic temperature and moistness: earth was cold and dry, water cold and moist, air hot and moist, and fire hot and dry. These traits compelled the atoms into certain movements, which he discusses in Aristotelian terms.Template:Sfnp In his later , he responds to objections against the infinities implicit in atomism with his belief that the atoms are infinitely divisible only in the sense that they are too minuscule for human apprehension and infinitely numerous only in the sense that their number isTemplate:Mdashfor humansTemplate:Mdashincalculably large.Template:Sfnp

Discussing cosmology, William elaborates a geocentric universe.Template:Sfnp The terrestrial atmosphere is said to become less dense and colder as altitude increases. Its circulation is also compared to ocean currents.Template:Fact By the level of the moon, it has been replaced by the ether;Template:Sfnp with Plato, he considers this to be a form of fire rather than Aristotle's separate element.Template:Sfnp The sun, moon, and five known planets followed their own motions while the fixed stars simply followed the motion of the ether itself.Template:Sfnp William presented three arguments for the existence of God based on the order of the world.Template:Sfnp He identified the parts of the Trinity with their attributes: God the Father as Power, Jesus the Son as Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit as Will or Goodness.Template:Sfnp Unlike Abelard, he did not argue that God could not avoid creation but he did tend to limit the direct acts of God to creation, with angels otherwise intermediary between Heaven and this world.Template:Sfnp However, his understanding of the physical world did prompt him to reject various parts of scripture, including that there is water in or beyond the heavens or that Eve was created from Adam's rib.Template:Sfnp

The discussion of medicine deals chiefly with procreation and childbirth. William's treatment here and in the includes various medieval European and Arab misconceptions, such as explanations for why premature infants born in the 8th month of pregnancy (supposedly) invariably died while those born in the 7th month sometimes lived.Template:Sfnp The supposed infrequency at which prostitutes gave birth was taken as evidence that pleasure was necessary for conception, while births from rape was then taken as proof that women derived carnal pleasure from the act despite their lack of rational consent.Template:Sfnp This work influenced Jean de Meung, the author of the second part of the .Template:Fact William's discussion of psychology was expressed in terms of the soul, which he considered to provide various powers when joined to the body.Template:Sfnp He believed that sense perception derived from the world, reason from God, and that memory preserved them both.Template:Sfnp

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See also

• Renaissance of the 12th century

References

Bibliography

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External links

• & at the Latin Library
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