| This study provides the first comprehensive examination of who read Plato during the "long twelfth century" (ca. 1050-1215), and what his readers thought about his doctrines. The method employed is doxographic: rather than examining doctrines and ideas which intellectual historians in hindsight can identify as Platonic, this study explores citations of and references to Plato in Latin texts of every genre from the period in order to discover what images of Plato medieval scholars confected. Much of the material for this study comes from manuscript sources, including marginal scholia in manuscripts of the Latin translation of Plato's Timaeus, as well as several closely related works.;I proceed through three chapters and six generations of scholars. In the first chapter, I explore the early medieval tradition, showing how within the Salian and Ottonian empires Plato became a flashpoint between pro-imperial and papalist partisans, and how the early French receptions of Plato were distinct from German. In the second chapter, the "high tide" of Platonic studies in the medieval West is examined, a period which includes some of the most important scholars of the early twelfth-century schools. In the third chapter, I trace the decline in Plato's fortunes in the second half of the twelfth century, while showing how Plato had continuing relevance in popular literary and spiritual works as well as in legal and political theory.;By providing a comprehensive treatment of Plato's readers (both sympathetic and critical), this study shows how the Greek philosopher was appropriated for the major cultural, intellectual and social movements of the twelfth-century renaissance, including the development of scholasticism, the investiture controversy, the renewal of religious life, the rise of popular heresy, the Crusades, the establishment of vernacular literary traditions, the influx of Arabic and Greek learning, and the refoundation of legal and political scholarship. I also provide a new theory explaining the persistent historical puzzle of Plato's thirteenth-century decline and Aristotle's assumption of a dominant position in Western intellectual life. |
