1. See for example Aquinas's Questiones Disputatea de Veritate, q. 2, a. 11 and
Summa Theologiae, I, q. 13, a. 6.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae De Potencia, q. 7, a. 5, ad 2.
3. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, James J. Sheridan, trans. (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973), Bk. V. ll. 44-46. Hereafter references to the
Anticlaudianus will be made in the text by the book and line numbers. Direct quotations
are from Sheridan's translation and have been correlated with the book and line numbers from the
Anticlaudianus, R. Bossuat, ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955).
page 55
4. On the relationship between the different meanings of "theology" in the twelfth century
and Alan's use of the term, see Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny, "Alain de Lille et la
'Theologia,'" in L'Homme devant Dieu, Mélanges offerts au Père Henri de
Lubac, vol. 2 (Aubier: Editions Montaigne, 1964), pp. 111-28.
5. D'Alverny, p. 120.
6. For a division of theology in these terms, see Alan's Quoniam Homines, P.
Glorieux, ed., in Archives d'Histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, vol. 20
(1953), p. 121 and d'Alverny, p. 115.
7. Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 216.
8. The companion to the Anticlaudianus, De Planctu Naturae, repeats this
same theme; in De Planctu, however, Alan opposes the "proper" language of the arts with
defective and ungrammatical language. In my view, in the Anticlaudianus the description
of Fortune in contradictory terms holds the same place as the barbarisms and solecisms described
in De Planctu; both Fortune and ungrammatical language are seen as that which "falls
below" the rules of nature and language and are linked, paradoxically, to that which rises above
these norms.
9. Cf. G. R. Evans, Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 47.
10. James J. Sheridan, in the introduction to his translation of the Anticlaudianus,
p. 36.
11. The theme of the disarray into which the rules of the seven liberal arts are thrown in
the face of the Incarnation is repeated in Alan's poem, Rhythmus de Incarnatione et septem
artibus. For a new edition of this poem, see d'Alverny, pp. 126-28.
