Hugh of Fouilloy
French cleric (1100–1174)
Hugh of Fouilloy (born between 1096 and 1111 in Fouilloy (near Amiens); died c. 1172, Saint-Laurent-au-Bois) was a French cleric, prior of St.-Nicholas-de-Regny (1132) and St.-Laurent-au-Bois (1152). He is notable for writing De claustro animae (The Cloister of the Soul) and De medicina animae (The Medicine of the Soul), allegorical texts on monastic spirituality. His De avibus, a moral treatise on birds was incorporated into many versions of the popular medieval bestiary.
De Avibus
De avibus contains around sixty chapters in two sections. The first part is mainly scriptural exegesis, drawn from the Bible and the Physiologus. The dove is the subject of the first eleven chapters, the winds and the hawk of the following eleven chapters, the turtledove and sparrow and their nesting habits of the next fifteen.
The second part consists of twenty-three chapters, each of which describes a different bird. The author draws upon the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville which assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would have otherwise been lost, De natura rerum by Rabanus Maurus, Gregory's Moralia in Job, and Ambrose's Hexaemeron.
The text is known by several alternative names such as the Aviarium (The Aviary), De columba deargentata (The Silvered Dove), and De tribus columbis (The three Doves).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5631. VIAF identifies the subject as 4944345. The Library of Congress control number is n90695188. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1096, 1111, 1172 and 1132.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hugh of Fouilloy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.