“…Their shared forms – the circle and the square – pointing to shared meanings. That the microcosmic city was a pervasive motif in medieval Christian thinking has long been recognized (see Allers 1944), but only relatively recently has it received much specific attention, particularly by Dutton (1983, 80), who has demonstrated how Plato's idea of the city‐state as sketched in the prologue to the Timaeus came to be transmitted subsequently through medieval texts, culminating with the ‘fairly widespread circulation of the idea among learned men generally linked with [the School of] Chartres’ in the twelfth century, men such as William of Conches and Alan of Lille. This process was long and protracted, as Dutton (1983, 83, 84) shows, and hinged on Latin glosses and commentaries based on a translation of the Timaeus by Calcidius, writing in the fourth century, who had ‘followed the lead of Plato in employing terms derived from a city‐state to describe the parts and functions of the [human] body’, drawing ‘a comparison between the cosmos and the human body, since, of course, the parts of man [ sic ] follow the arrangement of the cosmic body’.…”