Alan of Lille c. 1128 – 1202

Alan of Lille was a French Cistercian theologian, preacher, and Latin poet of the twelfth-century renaissance, known to medieval readers as Doctor Universalis for the breadth of his learning. He taught at Paris and Montpellier and ended his life as a Cistercian at Citeaux. His allegorical Latin poems The Plaint of Nature and the Anticlaudianus are masterpieces of the period, while his Rules of Theology and the Summa Quoniam Homines combine Augustinian theology with elements of newly recovered Aristotelian and Arabic learning. He defended the use of dialectic in theology while insisting on its limits in speech about God.