GILDUIN OF SAINT-VICTOR
(d. 1155). The first abbot of Saint-Victor, a house of regular canons at Paris founded by
William of Champeaux, Gilduin guided the development of the abbey in its crucial early
decades. He developed ties with the king, so that the abbey enjoyed royal patronage, and
oversaw the erection of the abbey’s first buildings. During his abbacy, a group of
distinguished canons brought fame to the abbey as a center of biblical study, theological
inquiry, and liturgical creativity, along with dedication to the contemplative ideal and to
ecclesiastical reform.
Grover A.Zinn
[See also: ADAM OF SAINT-VICTOR; HUGH OF SAINT-VICTOR; SAINT-
VICTOR, ABBEY AND SCHOOL OF; WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX]
Bonnard, Fourier. Histoire de l’abbaye royale et de l’ordre des chanoines réguliers de
Saint-Victor de Paris. 2 vols. Paris: Savaète, 1907.
GILES OF ROME
(Aegidius Colonna; ca. 1243–1316). One of the most outstanding students of Thomas
Aquinas, Giles was born at Rome, perhaps of the Colonna family. Contrary to his
family’s wishes, Giles embraced the religious life ca. 1258 at the convent of Santa Maria
del Populo of the Hermits of St. Augustine. Arriving at Paris ca. 1260, he studied and
taught there until 1278. He heard the lectures of Thomas during the latter’s second period
of teaching at Paris (1269–71) and strenuously defended Thomistic teachings against
Bishop Étienne Tempier’s condemnation in 1277. This dispute with the bishop
occasioned Giles’s departure from Paris; the bishop’s death helped smooth the way for
Giles’s return in 1285 as master of theology and the first Augustinian friar to hold a chair
in theology at Paris (1285–91).
King Philip III of France had charged Giles with the education of his son, the future
Philip IV the Fair, for whom Giles composed perhaps his best-known work, De regimine
principum (1280). By 1282, the work had been translated into French and in the 14th
century was translated into Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan, English, German, and Hebrew.
The work was an admirable combination of Aristotelian ethics and Christian moral and
spiritual teaching.
Giles maintained good relations with Philip, and in the year following his election to
the post of prior-general of the Augustinians (1292) Philip granted the order the Grand
Convent of the Augustinians in Paris. In 1295, Pope Boniface VIII, with Philip’s consent,
elevated Giles to the archiepiscopal see of Bourges. But in the ensuing controversy
between Philip and Boniface, Giles sided with Boniface, composing the treatise De
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