Fulbert of Chartres

← Encyclopedia

Fulbert of Chartres (born in the later tenth century, d. 1028) was a bishop, teacher, and writer whose school at the cathedral of Chartres became, in his lifetime, one of the leading centers of learning in northern France. His name survives less for any single doctrine than for what he built: a place where the liberal arts, medicine, and the study of scripture were taught together, in the generation just before the rise of the great urban schools that would become the medieval universities.

Little is certain about his origins; he was probably born in northern France or Italy to a family of modest standing. He studied at Reims, in the orbit of Gerbert of Aurillac — the mathematician and logician who later became Pope Sylvester II — and through that connection absorbed the revived interest in the arts of the trivium and quadrivium that Gerbert had helped reignite. By the 990s Fulbert was teaching at Chartres; in 1006 he was made its bishop, an office he held until his death. When the cathedral burned in 1020, he oversaw the beginning of its reconstruction, the Romanesque predecessor of the Gothic building that now stands.

His pupils called him venerabilis Socrates — the venerable Socrates — and the affection in the phrase is part of the record. What is known of his teaching comes chiefly from his own letters and from those of his students, who carried his reputation outward across France and beyond. Among them was Berengar of Tours, whose later disputes over the Eucharist would unsettle the eleventh-century Church; the school thus stood at the head of debates Fulbert himself did not live to see.

The surviving writings are a bishop’s working papers more than a system. His letters, edited and studied as a major source for the period, treat ecclesiastical administration, canon law, feudal obligation, and the ordinary business of a diocese; one of them gives an early and much-cited account of the mutual duties binding lord and vassal. He also composed hymns, sermons, and poems, several of them for the feasts of the Virgin Mary, to whom he was particularly devoted and whose cult at Chartres he did much to encourage. A sermon attributed to him on the Nativity of Mary was long read in that connection.

Modern scholarship treats Fulbert as a transitional figure rather than an original thinker — a transmitter who consolidated the learning of the tenth century and passed it to the eleventh. The label “School of Chartres” later attached above all to the twelfth-century masters who taught there, and historians caution against reading their Platonist philosophy back onto Fulbert’s more practical curriculum. What he established was the institution and the reputation; the speculative flowering came after him, on ground he had prepared.

→ Related: Alexander Of Hales · Siger Of Brabant · Middle Ages