Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy is a collection of twenty-one essays based on papers originally delivered at a conference commemorating the nine hundredth anniversary of Anselm’s death in 1109. The breadth of the essays presented in this volume reflects the enduring fascination with Anselm and his world in ways that stress both the continuities and discontinuities with the present-day. The essays consider the following: Anselm’s legacy in his own lifetime and amongst the communities in which his living memory was preserved longest; the impact of his thought in the twelfth century; the rather different inspiration his thought provided in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; Anselmian texts and their influence in vernacular translation, notably Middle English; and twentieth-century reception of Anselm’s life and thought within Roman Catholic, continental Protestant, and Anglican history and theology, as well as the continued place of Anselmian argument within philosophical thought. To study Anselm, and to study his legacy, is to enter a much larger world of reflection and interpretation on questions and issues he himself made central, and which concern some of the deepest subjects of human inquiry: ontology, creation, the purposes of human life, and matters of faith.