Peter Lombard

Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1160) was an Italian-born scholastic theologian who became one of the most influential figures in medieval Western Christianity. Born near Novara in Piedmont, he studied in Italy and France before settling in Paris, where he taught theology at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and was briefly Bishop of Paris in the last year of his life. His Four Books of Sentences — a systematic compilation of patristic and contemporary theological opinions on the Trinity, Creation, the Incarnation, and the Sacraments — became the standard textbook of theology at medieval universities for nearly four centuries. Virtually every major Western theologian from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham wrote a commentary on the Sentences, making Lombard's framework the organizing architecture of scholastic theology. He also produced the Magna Glossatura, an influential gloss on the Psalms and Pauline Epistles that displaced the Glossa ordinaria as the most widely studied exegetical text on those books.