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Sally Vaughn's Anselm: An Examination of the Foundations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Richard W. Southern
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Extract

To attempt to portray Anselm in all his varied activities as monk, prior, abbot, archbishop; as philosopher, theologian, writer of private prayers and meditations; in his letters of spiritual counsel and ecclesiastical policy; as man of God, friend, teacher and guide to the spiritual life; and in his relations with popes, kings, episcopal colleagues, lay men and women, monks and nuns, is one of the most challenging tasks in medieval history. The number of possible combinations in which his life and thought played a part is very large. To add to the difficulties of the subject, much of the evidence is tangential: we interpret for one purpose material that was created for quite different ends. The material is full enough to invite speculation, but rarely full enough to provide clear-cut solutions to the questions asked. To take only two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: Anselm never wrote any account of the principles which guided his public life as archbishop, which Vaughn is particularly concerned to interpret; and, at the other end of the scale, he wrote much on friendship, but all that he wrote, as we shall see, is capable of widely different interpretations. Even his silences cry aloud for interpretation; and when we come to that, we are in very deep water indeed.

Type
What Was Saint Anselm?
Information
Albion , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Summer 1988 , pp. 181 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988

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Footnotes

*

Sally N. Vaughn. Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan: the Innocence of the Dove and the Wisdom of the Serpent. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1987. Pp. xxi, 392. $45.00.

References

1 See Schmitt, F. S., “Die unter Anselm veranstaltete Ausgabe seiner Werke und Briefe: die Codices Bodley 271 und Lambeth 59,” Scriptorium 9 (1955):64–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article was based on earlier studies by Schmitt himself, and by Wilmart who first seriously investigated the manuscript tradition of Anselm's works. For Cantor's use of this reconstruction, see Cantor, N. F., Church, Kingship and Lay Investiture in England, 1089–1135 (London, 1969), pp. 169–70Google Scholar; and for Fröhlich's studies, see “The Genesis of the Collection of St Anselm's letters,” American Benedictine Review 35 (1984):249–266Google Scholar; and “The letters omitted from Anselm's Collection of Letters,” Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 6 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984), pp. 58–71Google Scholar. For my own caveat, see St Anselm and his Biographer (London, 1963), pp. 67–8Google Scholar. Schmitt later concurred: see Southern, and Schmitt, , Memorials of St Anselm (London, 1969), pp. 333–53Google Scholar, where the texts in the supplementary quires of Lambeth MS 59 (which will be described below) are published.

2 In both of his letters to Thidericus Anselm addressed him as filio carissimo. But, in writing to monks, he normally wrote fratri et filio. This is by no means conclusive, but it is borne out by the inscription in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.3.32: Servus Thiodricus* dominis me scripsit amicus, Pro quo dic, lector, “Sibi parce deus pie rector; Huic et parce deus qui sic fuerit mentor eius.” *Thiodricus has been corrected to Thidericus by a hand which may also have written the final inscription in Lambeth MS 59.

3 Since it is important for dating L, to know the sources and date of William of Malmesbury's collection of Anselm's letters (Lambeth Palace MS 224 = M), the following observations may be added to what is said above. We may begin with the presumption that William could only have made this collection in Canterbury. The questions then are: did he make it from N and L, or from the raw materials from which L and N were compiled, or from some other source? and when did he make it?

As Thomson, R. M. (William of Malmesbury [1987], p. 73)Google Scholar has remarked, William's presence at Canterbury can be traced on two occasions, the first between 1109 and 1115, the second between 1122 and 1125. The first visit was probably the occasion on which he gained that knowledge of Anselm's letters which he displays in his Gesta Regum. In this work, he used Eadmer's Vita Anselmi and Historia Novorum in their first recensions of the period 1109–15, and the only letters of Anselm which he quotes come from the Historia Novorum.

In his slightly later Gesta Pontificum, however, William used Eadmer's Historia Novorum and Vita Anselmi in the recension of c. 1122–23. He quotes a single letter to Anselm (Ep. 401) from the Historia Novorum, but he also mentions the existence of an epistolarum seriem quae in immensum porrigitur, apostolici ad regem et Anselmum, et Anselmi ad regem, et regis ad Anselmum (G.P, p. 113). He declares that he has no intention of using this material and recommends all who wish to read Anselm's letters to make a copy of Eadmer's Historia Novorum. This in itself is sufficient to suggest that L did not yet exist, for who would suggest copying the Historia Novorum for Anselm's letters, if L was there to be copied?

These words in the Gesta Pontificum were written in the period 1122–25, when (as Thomson, in a quite different connection says) William was “rummaging through the armaria of the two great Canterbury houses (St Augustine's and Christ Church Cathedral).” The likelihood is that that it was in the armaria of the monastic cathedral that William found the “vast series” of Anselm's letters, and made his own collection, now preserved in M. M could not have been copied from L, or even from L with the addition of the letters in the Historia Novorum, for it contains letters which are in neither. Moreover, though by far the greater part of the letters in M of the period of Anselm's archiepiscopate are also in L, the order of these letters in M is so confused as to rule out dependence on L. Further, for the letters of Anselm as prior and abbot, M knows nothing of the texts in L: nearly everywhere his text agrees with N against L; but M also has material not in N, even when we have made allowance for the lost quire at the end of N. In brief, everything in M points to its archiepiscopal correspondence being based on the bundles of letters which were later used also for L; and its pre-archiepiscopal correspondence being based on the materials from Bec which were sent to Anselm in 1092 and had been used also in N, which is perhaps a Rochester MS (see Clover, H. and Gibson, M., Letters of Lanfranc [1979], pp. 15, 20–21Google Scholar). It is notable that among these materials M alone preserves the draft of the Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi which Anselm had asked the monks of Bec to send him in that year.

The contents and arrangement of M make it inconceivable that it was based on L, and since M can only have been made at Canterbury, the conclusion that L did not yet exist seems unavoidable. As for the date of M, the period 1122–25, when William was certainly at Canterbury, seems most likely. It is perhaps not too wild a conjecture that it was William's success with these materials that inspired the monks of Canterbury to make their own definitive collection in L.

4 The text which precedes this inscription is an incomplete copy of the eulogy of Anselm already copied in the first supplement. It is printed in Migne, PL 158, pp. 135–38.