Adam of Balsham ( or ') (c. 1100/1102 – c. 1157/1169) was an Anglo-Norman scholastic and churchman.

Life

Adam was born in Balsham, near

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, England. He studied with

Peter Lombard Peter Lombard (also Peter the Lombard, Pierre Lombard or Petrus Lombardus; 1096 – 21/22 August 1160) was an Italian scholasticism, scholastic theologian, Bishop of Paris, and author of ''Sentences, Four Books of Sentences'' which became the s ...

at the

University of Paris The University of Paris (), known Metonymy, metonymically as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 during the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated wit ...

. He later taught in Paris, teaching

John of Salisbury John of Salisbury (late 1110s – 25 October 1180), who described himself as Johannes Parvus ("John the Little"), was an English author, philosopher, educationalist, diplomat and bishop of Chartres. The historian Hans Liebeschuetz described him ...

and

William of Tyre William of Tyre (; 29 September 1186) was a Middle Ages, medieval prelate and chronicler. As Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tyre, archbishop of Tyre, he is sometimes known as William II to distinguish him from his predecessor, William I of Tyr ...

. Further, he may have been a contemporary of Rainald of Dassel (c. 1120 – 14 August 1167) there. Gabriel Nuchelmans surmises that he may have been the first person to introduce the term ''enuntiabile'', which came to be used in the same sense as

dictum In legal writing, a (Latin 'something that has been said'; plural ) is a statement made by a court. It may or may not be binding as a precedent. United States In United States legal terminology, a ''dictum'' is a statement of opinion consid ...

.Nuchelmans, p. 169. Many sources have surmised that Adam of Balsham and Adam, Bishop of St Asaph (or Adam the Welshman) are the same person, but Raymond Klibansky concludes that they were two different men. The Petit-Pont attached to Adam's name and which crosses the Seine linking the west front of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris (and the site of a former bishop's palace) to the

Left Bank In geography, a bank is the land alongside a body of water. Different structures are referred to as ''banks'' in different fields of geography. In limnology (the study of inland waters), a stream bank or river bank is the terrain alongsid ...

St Michel area would have been the main centre of Adam's intellectual group (it was renamed in 2013 with the addition of the name of Cardinal Lustiger: 'Petit-Pont Cardinal Lustiger').

Works

* Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (ed.), ''Twelfth Century Logic: Texts and Studies. Vol. I:Adam balsamiensis parvipontani. Ars disserendi (Dialectica Alexandri)'', Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956. * ''De utensilibus'', (or ''Fale tolum'') on rare words.

Notes

External links

* 1100s births 12th-century deaths 12th-century English philosophers 12th-century English writers 12th-century writers in Latin Anglo-Normans English logicians English male non-fiction writers English Roman Catholic writers Catholic philosophers People from Balsham Scholastic philosophers {{England-nonfiction-writer-stub

Life

Works

Notes

Further reading

External links