Richard of Saint-Victor is more often discussed in histories of mysticism than in histories of philosophy or scholasticism, being seen as on one side of a divide, perceived as increasing in the twelfth century, between scholastic and monastic theologies. It is indeed not easy to unpack the philosophical premises behind his work. The author of the book under review has successfully done just that, contributing to a more complex picture of twelfth-century culture than the one that lies behind a scholastic/monastic dichotomy. He points for example to the Boethian legacy behind Richard's exegetical practice, while showing how Richard's approach ‘holds together the rigorous intellectual inquiry of the schools … with the mystical desire for an interior knowledge of God’ (p. 158). In an integral reading of what are often distinguished as theological and mystical works Coulter focuses on Richard's De archa, radiating from there to his other works, especially De trinitate. De archa is seen as both an expression of the desire for the ascent to God and the restoration of the imago dei, and the instrument to realise such a desire, in a programme that contains six stages of contemplation. Distinguishing the different meanings that Richard gives to ‘contemplation’, Coulter concentrates on contemplation as a mental activity (of which the investigation in De trinitate is another example). He shows how in the first three stages of such contemplation, interpretation of the visible world of words and things – God's language – prepares the reader for the further ascent, via the exploration of the invisible world, of the human mind, angels, God. Where the first stages are characterised by learning how to interpret words and things – in the exegetical tradition of Saint-Victor first developed by Hugh of Saint-Victor, and explained very well here – in the last it is the process of collatio, using the images of the Ark and the Cherubim as points of comparison, by which the mental activity of the contemplative proceeds towards its goal. Unlike some of Richard's interpreters, Coulter sees in Richard's language not an apophatic Dionysianism: however difficult and beyond grasp, for Richard investigation of God's nature and the Trinity is not, finally, beyond human effort, in preparation for divine revelation. Central here as well as throughout Richard's work is the idea of fittingness that dominates not only the cosmos and the different levels of exegesis but also the Trinity and the modus of the Incarnation, and is the basis for Richard's epistemological optimism. The author ends with some desiderata for further research: into the Boethian legacy, the influence of Gregory the Great, and the importance of experientia in Richard's work and epistemology. As Coulter says (p. 26) ‘Richard's metaphors and substructures create a labyrinthine quality to his work, with multiple layers of symbols making it difficult to understand fully.’ This is well in accordance with Richard's aim to treat the life of contemplation and its objects ‘after the manner of contemplation’ as he explains in De archa, circling around and then again concentrating on things, enabling his reader to enact the contemplative movement as he had described it in his introduction. Coulter's book succeeds in giving the reader a fuller understanding of the underlying assumptions employed.