Hugh of St Victor is currently enjoying a remarkable revival within a number of different national traditions. In France, Dominique Poirel and Patrice Sicard watch over a team of researchers engaged in meticulous textual scholarship, producing editions for the Corpus Christianorum series and translations of key works of this key thinker of the twelfth century. In Germany, Rainer Berndt directs another team that has produced significant publications, including recently a new edition of Hugh's Hauptwerk, the De sacramentis. In the USA, the thrust of Victorine scholarship is more theological than philological. None the less it is important. Boyd Coolman's book on Hugh's theology, published by CUP, inevitably invites comparison with Paul Rorem's volume on Hugh of St Victor (2009), published by OUP. From the outset it should be stated that this volume, modestly subtitled An interpretation, is a great success, by virtue of precisely those virtues valued by Hugh – clarity, structure and form.

Coolman focuses on the theology of Hugh, rather than on his philosophy, exegesis or historical significance. While he provides a brief introduction to the dynamic urban context that Hugh encountered in Paris when he arrived at St Victor in about 1115, in particular to the cause of clerical reform to which Hugh was committed as an Augustinian canon, the substance of his monograph is devoted to explicating his theology. Above all, he singles out the centrality of forma in his theological perspective – as ‘dynamic process, integral structure and beautified result’. Hugh's notion of re-formation as a work of restoration, namely of creating a dwelling place for God within the soul, provides Coolman with a unifying theme, shaped by a fascination with architectural imagery, when talking not just about the Church, but about the soul. Avoiding stereotyped clichés about monastic and scholastic theology, Coolman explains how Hugh's theology is concerned with building a sense of divine dwelling within the soul.

One consequence of this focus on theology is that relatively limited attention is given to the philosophical framework on which Hugh's theological teaching is based. While there is a section on the Didascalicon (although none on the minor treatises on the liberal arts) relatively late in the monograph, concerned with discussion of memory practices, the reader gets relatively little sense of the intellectual context in which Hugh developed as a teacher of both the liberal arts and divinity at St Victor. Coolman skates over the controversial question of Hugh's critical attitude towards the thinking of Peter Abelard, in particular over the possibility, raised by Poirel, that Hugh's use of the Trinitarian triad of power, wisdom and benignity was not taken from Abelard (as had been thought), but was in fact the inspiration for Abelard. The image that he presents is more of a figure, floating with Platonic idealism above the many theological debates provoked in part by the questions raised by Abelard. Anselm of Laon, whose significance and influence in systematising theological reflection in the early twelfth century cannot be over-estimated – as Giraud's recent study, Per verba magistri (Brepols 2010) has shown – barely merits a mention in the index. Thus Hugh's full originality in creating a systematic synthesis of both secular and divine learning is not given close attention. While Hugh was profoundly influenced by Augustine in his attitudes, he created a synthetic framework for Augustinian themes (influenced it must also be said by exegetical principles dear to Gregory the Great) that made Augustine's thought accessible to the classroom.

Where Coolman excels is in his presentation of the sapiential theology that shapes Hugh's thinking about the Wisdom that underpins creation. He has an appreciation of Hugh's awareness of beauty in creation as manifesting divine order. Hugh draws on Augustinian themes of grace (and, it should be added, the legacy of Greek patristic thought available to him in Latin translation), in a way that provides a more confident awareness of the skills of human nature. Hugh was troubled by Abelard's focus on language because it seemed, in his eyes, to do an injustice to the capacity of the material world to mediate the divine. Coolman's focus is more on the goal of being beautiful (‘pulchrum esse’) as the goal desired for creation by God. He singles out Hugh's aesthetic theology for the reason that it is attractive to us today.

In Hugh's perspective, the Fall is a primal de-formation, a loss of the sense of divine form intended for creation. We do not learn about the process by which Hugh developed these ideas. None the less it is clear that his thought is profoundly Platonic in character – and likely developed in response to the more strictly philosophical Platonism being pursued at Chartres. Hugh has the capacity to communicate Platonic ideas through scriptural images accessible to an audience familiar with the Bible. In the process, Scripture becomes the primary vehicle for understanding the tension between de-formation and re-formation in human experience. In this perspective, Christ is the exemplar through whom this re-formation becomes possible, while Scripture is the vehicle through which we learn to achieve this process.

The third part of Coolman's monograph is devoted to the theme of the implementation of this wisdom, above all through memory practices, meditative practices and moral practices. There is a triadic structure to this analysis that Hugh would have found immensely congenial. Coolman demonstrates that Hugh's theology is not about abstraction for its own sake, but about implementation of true form in the soul. One could ask whether there is sufficient analysis here of the many theological debates in which Hugh became engaged, such as (with Abelard) about the nature of love. The many questions that Hugh raises in his systematic treatises show how fully he was engaged in theological debates of his day. Yet even if Coolman offers more of an interpretation of general themes in Hugh's thought than a definitive synthesis, he successfully shows how that thought can still exert fascination today.