Joseph Hopper

Joseph’s research focusses on the community of Saint Victor in Paris during the twelfth century. The victorines were a religious community of Augustinian canons who first established themselves on the Left Bank in Paris, in 1108. His research argues that existing scholarship has neglected the importance of communal life in understanding how the victorines conducted themselves, as well as in understanding how they were viewed by twelfth and thirteenth-century contemporaries. By using a wide range of sources—including constitutional documents, instructional treatises, letters, and theological works—his research argues against the idea of a ‘school of Saint Victor’, suggesting instead a model of ‘intellectual community’. The implicit separation of ‘communal life’ and ‘intellectual life’ into two separate streams which takes place in much of the historiography is argued to be both erroneous and fundamentally misleading. With these sources, Joseph explores the importance of mealtimes, informal conversation, gesture, dress, sermons, punishment, liturgy, prayer and contemplation, to fully understanding the ‘intellectual community’ of Saint Victor.

His research puts discussion of how the victorines ate their meals, and how they dipped their bread, alongside considerations of how Hugh conceptualised the sanitised, emotionless memories of angels. Both, Joseph suggests, are required to appreciate Saint Victor. Through this argument he pushes against grand, homogenising narratives which default to a well-trodden story of twelfth-century schools giving way in the thirteenth century to universities. Saint Victor points instead to a differentiated educational landscape and to a culture of experimentation in organising forms of communal life in twelfth-century Paris. In this sense, it is aligned with recent arguments which suggest that ‘Paris has always been an assembly of villages, a city of multiple hearts’ rather than a monolithic whole. He is also interested in how the victorines offer fruitful avenues for thinking about education more generally and how their ideas of community can inform contemporary discussions around education. In this vein, Joseph engages especially with the thought of the twentieth-century theologian, philosopher, and Catholic priest, Ivan Illich. 

PhD

Supervisor: Professor John Sabapathy (primary), Dr. Emily Corran (secondary)
Working title: TBC
Expected completion date: TBC

Conference Papers and Seminars 

• Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, 2021, Memory and Salvation in Hugh of St. Victor’s ‘De sacramentis christianae fidei’
• Institute of Historical Research, Medieval Europe, 1150-1550, 2024 – Intellectual Community in Saint Victor, 1108-1274
• History of Education Society Seminar, (forthcoming, Dec.2024) Deschooling Society: Ivan Illich and his Medieval Influences

Teaching 

• Senior Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, Writing History
• Senior Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, Making Medieval Europe, 1150-1550

Awards

2021-2024: Research scholarship, UCL