Gilbert of Poitiers c. 1085 – 1154

Gilbert of Poitiers, also known as Gilbert de la Porree, was a French scholastic theologian and bishop of Poitiers and one of the most acute minds of the twelfth-century renaissance. After studies at Chartres and Laon, he taught at the schools of Chartres and Paris before his elevation to the episcopate. His commentaries on the theological treatises of Boethius developed an original distinction between the form by which a thing is what it is and the thing itself, which set him apart from his Augustinian contemporaries. His teaching on the Trinity was examined at the Council of Reims in 1148 in the presence of Bernard of Clairvaux, but he was not condemned, and his metaphysics shaped later scholastic debate.