Robert of Courçon, c.1160-1219.

Also known as Robert Courson, he was an English Scholastic, ardent campaigner against usury and formative chancellor of the university of Paris.

Originally from Derbyshire, England, Robert of Courçon may have spent some time at Oxford before moving to Paris to study under Peter the Chanter.  He was canon of Noyon and moved to Paris in 1195.

Robert of Courçon was elected chancellor of the university of Paris in 1211, shortly after the institutionalization of the ban on the "natural philosophy" books of Aristotle and his Arab commentators in 1210.  In 1212, Pope Innocent III, a friend from his student days, appointed Robert as Cardinal-priest of Santo Stefano, and he was commissioned on numerous missions as a papal legate. 

An ardent opponent of usury, Courçon had written fervently against it in his incomplete Summa (c.1208) and preached for the implementation of its ban.  In 1213-15, he was the papal legate to a series of councils in Paris, Rheims, Rouen, Clermont and Bourges that implemented the ban on usury.

In 1215, again as Papal legate, Robert de Courçon reviewed and renewed the ban on Aristotle at Paris.  He explicitly allowed the teaching of Aristotle's logical treatises and his Ethics under strictly controlled conditions, but banned the teaching of Metaphysics and all his natural philosophy works (Physics, etc.), including a ban on all summaries and commentaries on them.  He also set down degree requirements for students, requiring that a Master of Arts require six years of Artes studies and a minimum age of 21 and forbade anyone from lecturing on theology before the age of thirty-five, and at least five years study of theology. 

Robert of Courçon attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and, on the route between Paris and Rome, visited numerous churches to preach zealously for the Fifth Crusade.  His activities in this regard were brought under suspicion, and he was later convicted of embezzlement of Crusader alms by the French church authorities, which required the active intervention of his old friend Innocent III to prevent it going any further.  In 1218, Robert of Courçon left on the Fifth Crusade as papal legate for Pope Honorius III.  He died at Damietta in 1219.

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