Anselm of Laon - Works

Works

Anselm's greatest work, an interlinear and marginal gloss on the 'Scriptures', the Glossa ordinaria, now attributed to him and his followers, was one of the great intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages. It has been frequently reprinted. The significance of the gloss, which was most likely assembled after Anselm's death by his students, such as Gilbert de la Porrée, and based on Anselm's teaching, is that it marked a new way of learning — it represented the birth of efforts to present discrete patristic and earlier medieval interpretations of individual verses of Scripture in a readily-accessible, easily-referenced way. This theme was subsequently adopted and extended by the likes of Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard and later Thomas Aquinas, who gave us 'handbooks' for what we would now call theology.

Other commentaries apparently by Anselm have been ascribed to various writers, principally to Anselm of Canterbury. A list of them, with notice of Anselm's life, is contained in the Histoire littéraire de la France, x. 170-189.

The works are collected in Migne's Patrologia Latina, tome 162; some unpublished Sententiae were edited by G Lefevre (Milan, 1894), on which see Barthélemy Hauréau in the Journal des savants for 1895. The commentary on the Psalms published by Migne in vol. 116 and attributed to Haymo of Halberstadt has also been identified as possibly being the work of Anselm.

Read more about this topic:  Anselm Of Laon

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast
    crowned him with glory and honor.
    Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands;
    Bible: Hebrew Psalm VIII (l. VIII, 5–6)

    Separatism of any kind promotes marginalization of those unwilling to grapple with the whole body of knowledge and creative works available to others. This is true of black students who do not want to read works by white writers, of female students of any race who do not want to read books by men, and of white students who only want to read works by white writers.
    bell hooks (b. 1955)

    All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)