medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
We know about Anselm of Nonantola (d. 803) chiefly from Paul the Deacon's _Historia Langobardorum_. Duke of Friuli and brother-in-law of the Lombard king Aistulf, he became a cleric and with Aistulf's support founded, a couple of years after the Lombard conquest of Ravenna in ca. 750, a monastery in southern Emilia near Bologna along the main road to and from the Lombard capitals in the north. This later became the great abbey of (pope) St. Sylvester at today's Nonantola (MO), whose reconstruction of its early history included an imagined papal donation of Sylvester's remains to abbot Anselm as recorded in Anselm's eleventh-century Vita (BHL 541) and other texts.
Anselm's abbatial tenure saw the creation of several dependencies. It was interrupted for the entirety of the reign of king Desiderius, when another abbot was appointed and Anselm lived in exile at Montecassino. Anselm was restored after Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774.
This panel from the twelfth-century sculptures of the main portal of the abbey church at Nonantola, the basilica di San Silvestro, seems to show Aistulf endowing Anselm with the possession of the land on which his monastery would be built:
http://tinyurl.com/yk8aako
This one shows the completed monastery with a founder's portrait of the now tonsured and beardless abbot Anselm (with this former _dux_ here somewhat resembling a more recent _duce_):
http://tinyurl.com/yl7ymub
Here Anselm receives the pope's blessing:
http://tinyurl.com/ykp7ruf
Other views of sculptures on this portal are here:
http://tinyurl.com/ycbz8sf
Two pages of views of the abbey church start here:
http://tinyurl.com/yzz8pu
The abbey's Italian-language page on its church:
http://tinyurl.com/yh3sxln
Best,
John Dillon
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