The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume I. From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance.
X. English Scholars of Paris and Franciscans of Oxford.
§ 9. Geoffrey de Vinsauf; Alexander Neckam.
Alain’s contemporary Geoffrey de Vinsauf (fl. 1200), who was educated at St. Frideswide’s, Oxford, and travelled in France and Italy, dedicated to Innocent III his Poëetria Nova, an Art of Poetry founded partly on Horace, and recommending the ancient metres in preference to the modern rimes, with examples of the various kinds of composition. In the same period Alexander Neckam, of St. Albans, distinguished himself in Paris in 1180, and, late in life, became abbot of Cirencester. He is the author of an amusing treatise De Naturis Rerum, with many anecdotes of animals, and with an attack on the method of teaching logic in the university of Paris. In his lengthy elegiac poem De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae he traverses much of the same ground. He further describes the chief seats of learning in his day, summing up in a single couplet the four faculties in the university of Paris, the paradisus deliciarum:
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