Didascalicon

A guide to reading and study, written in the late 1120s at the abbey of St Victor in Paris. Its full title means 'on the study of reading'. Hugh begins with the purpose of learning: through wisdom, human beings can restore in themselves the divine likeness damaged by the Fall. Books I–III map all knowledge. Philosophy divides into the theoretical, the practical, the mechanical and the logical, and Hugh gives a place to seven mechanical arts, from fabric-making and agriculture to medicine and theatre, alongside the seven liberal arts. He then sets out the order in which to read, and the qualities a student needs: humility, a quiet life, a trained memory and the sense that no learning is wasted. A famous passage praises the person to whom the whole world is a foreign land. Books IV–VI turn to scripture: its books and authors, and how to read it in three senses, history, allegory and tropology, in the right order.

It is the clearest map of what a twelfth-century scholar thought learning was for and how to go about it, and its advice on reading, memory and humility still speaks to students.