Rhetoric in Gilbert of Poitiers’s Commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate: numeratio

In this paper I analyse a digression in Gilbert’s commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate, chapter 3 (paras. 11-21). The key notions in these paragraphs are ‘numbering’, ‘distributing’, ‘collecting’, and ‘repeating’ (numeratio, distributio, collectio, repetitio, and the corresponding verbs). It is worth noting that only some of these notions, namely ‘numbering’ (numeratio) and ‘repeating’ (repetitio), appear in Boethius’s opuscule. My intention is to show that in these paragraphs Gilbert of Poitiers, as he often does in his commentaries on the Opuscula sacra, modifies the meanings of Boethius’s words by shifting or enlarging their semantic field and by adding new analysis and new points of view. Here indeed Gilbert moves away from the mainly arithmetical interpretation presupposed by Boethius for the notion of numeratio. Gilbert rather tends to use the word numeratio as signifying—in the sense of the rhetorical figure of enumeratio—listing, enumerating, recollecting, summing up. In other words, Gilbert here would be considering the arithmetical operation of repeating or counting units as one kind of the broader activity of ‘listing’ or ‘enumerating’ the fondamental items in his ontology: subsistents, forms, parts, wholes, units.