Reading and the Work of Restoration

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.