Peter Lombard c. 1096 – 1160

Peter Lombard, known as the Master of the Sentences, was an Italian theologian and bishop of Paris, and the author of the most influential textbook of medieval scholastic theology. Born in Lombardy and trained at Reims, Bologna, and Paris, he taught at the cathedral school of Notre Dame before his elevation to the see of Paris in 1159. His Four Books of Sentences, completed around 1158, organized the whole of Christian doctrine into a single ordered work drawn from Scripture and the Church Fathers. From the thirteenth century onward, every aspirant master of theology in Latin Europe was required to lecture on the Sentences, making it the principal vehicle of medieval theological argument.