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The works are collected in Migne's Patrologia Latina, tome 162; some unpublished Sententiae were edited by G Lefevre (Milan, 1894), on which see Barthélemy Hauréau in the Journal des savants for 1895.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:

    You are always looking for already-felt emotions, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new when you don’t look too closely. Artists are cleaners, don’t let yourself be taken in by them. True modern works of art are made not by artists but quite simply by men.
    Francis Picabia (1878–1953)

    I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
    William James (1842–1910)