Godfrey of Saint Victor

He had initially studied and taught the trivium at the University of Paris between the years 1144 and 1155 at the school on the Petit Pont founded by Adam of Balsham.

Most are unpublished, but the published sermons include: The central theme of Microcosmus recalls the insight of classical philosophy and of the early Church Fathers, viz., that man is a microcosm, containing in himself the material and spiritual elements of reality.

In the Microcosmus Godfrey compared sensuality, imagination, reason and intelligence to the respective four classical elements, earth, water, air and fire.

[12] In his other notable work, the Fons philosophiae (c. 1176; "The Fount of Philosophy"), Godfrey, in rhymed verse, proposed a classification of learning and considered the controversy between realists and nominalists (who held that ideas were only names, not real things) over the problem of universal concepts.

Fons philosophiae is an allegorical account of the sources of Godfrey's intellectual formation (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, and Boethius), symbolized as a flowing stream from which he drew water as a student.

Godfrey's writings have won appreciation as a prime example of 12th-century humanism only through relatively recent scholarship, although their fundamental concepts of the positive values of man and nature were recognized to a limited extent by the high Scholasticism of the 13th century.

[13] The poem describes an exploration of the seven liberal arts as an allegorical journey through a system of rivers, in which draughts from different streams render different meanings.