This book represents the first comprehensive study of the role
of historia in the processes of reading and restoration
(or salvation) in the theology of Hugh of St Victor. By providing a
close reading of Hugh’s major works, it affords a window onto
the holistic vision of liberal arts education, scriptural exegesis,
moral formation, and spirituality that attracted young students to
the Parisian School of St Victor in the early twelfth century.
Hugh’s teaching on memory-training and his view of the
liberal arts as roads leading the reader toward God have the aim of
preparing students for scriptural reading and its three
subdisciplines – historia, allegory, and tropology.
This pedagogical program both draws on and diverges from the
thought of Augustine. For Hugh, the fallen human being begins to be
restored to the image of God through a program of ordered reading
in the liberal arts and Sacred Scripture; this restoration
continues at the fundamental level of historia even as the student
advances through reading’s higher disciplines. In responding
to and concretizing the moral teaching found in the scriptural
text, the reader comes to participate in the ongoing history of
salvation.