Thierry of Chartres (fl. c.1130–50)

Thierry of Chartres, who taught at Paris and Chartres in the mid-twelfth century, was a polymath and a Platonist. The Heptateuchon, a large and ambitious collection of texts for teaching the liberal arts, testifies to the range of his interests from grammar, logic and rhetoric to mathematics and astronomy; they also stretched to theology. To Thierry is attributed an explanation of the account of creation in Genesis, after God’s initial action, in physical terms. He also used arithmetical analogies to illustrate the Trinity and, drawing on a variety of Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, analysed the relationship between God and his creation.