ROBERT OF MELUN (Melodunensis). - Theologian and bishop, b. in England at the end of the 11th century, d. at Hereford on 27 February 1167.

A student at Oxford and Paris, around 1137 he succeeded Abelard as professor of dialectic in the schola artium of the "Montagne Ste-Geneviève" and around 1142 as professor of theology at Melun; at the Council of Reims (1184), together with Peter Lombard (v.) and John of Cornwall (v.), he opposed the Trinitarian doctrine of Gilbert of Poitiers (v.). After some years of teaching at the abbey of St. Victor (Paris), on the suggestion of St. Thomas Becket, he was summoned to England (1160) by King Henry II and appointed (1163) bishop of Hereford; although for a time he was too loyal to the sovereign against Becket, he later aligned himself decisively in favor of the distinguished martyr.

Between 1145 and 1155 he composed a commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, substantially preserved in the Quaestiones de divina pagina (ed. R. Martin, Oeuvres de Robert de Melun, I, Louvain 1932), and a theological essay on the Pauline epistles: Quaestiones de epistolis Pauli (ed. R. Martin, op. cit., II, ibid. 1938); the quaestiones follow the lectio of the biblical text and discuss, with method and original insights, important topics that were later taken up by the author in his most celebrated work (which became almost a classic in theology at the end of the 12th century), the Sententiae (unpublished; the manuscripts are numerous), which, although imitating in their arrangement the De Sacramentis of Hugh of St. Victor, do not attain its intimate fervor and innate simplicity. A personal theologian endowed with intuition, R. of M., though an admirer of the Victorine school, dared to attack the friends of the great abbey (William of St-Thierry and St. Bernard) and to combat Peter Lombard himself; defending Abelard in the question of the Trinitarian appropriatio, he opened the way to a doctrine that was accepted by all the great scholastics of the 13th century.

Bibliography7 works

BIBL.: R. Martin, Pro Petro Abelardo. Un plaidoyer de Robert de Melun, in Rev. des sc. philos. et théol., 12 (1923), pp. 308-33; A. Landgraf, Familienbildung bei Paulineuhommentaren des 1. Jahrh.: Robert von Melun und seine Schule, in Biblica, 13 (1932), pp. 160-93; F. Blumentzer, Robert von Melun und die Schule Anselm von Laon, in Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch., 53 (1934), pp. 117-70; M.-M. Gorge, s. v. in DThC, XIII, coll. 2751-53; C. Spico, Esquisse d'une hist. de l'exégèse latine au moyen âge, Paris 1944, pp. 131-32; J. de Ghellinck, L'essor de la littér. latine au XIIe siècle, I, Paris-Brussels 1946, pp. 56-57; A. Landgraf, Einführung in die Gesch. der theol. Liter. der Frühscholastik, Regensburg 1948, pp. 69-71 (on p. 70 the manuscripts in which the Sententiae are preserved are indicated).

Antonio Piolanti

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Robert of Melun (Melodunensis)

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