For the last couple of years university microfilms has been scanning new
dissertations and making them available to subscribers online. The diss by
Bob's student is among the ones now available for download. I discovered
this new feature by accident & it doesn't seem well known. So I think it's
worth the bandwidth to recommend that you check it out through your
library's proxy server (or however you do it where you are).
Here's the abstract of the diss on Anselm's spirituality:
Anselm, Prior and Abbot of the abbey of Bec in Normandy, and later
Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109), stood at the crucial turning point
leading to the renaissance and renewal of Christian thought in the twelfth
century. This dissertation studies Anselm's place among his contemporaries
of the later half of the eleventh century, his sense of the Christian past
and his appropriation of Augustine's thought. Anselm's Augustinian
appropriations can be divided into three distinct phases. First, the period
prior to 1076 when Anselm wrote the Monologion the work which put his
Augustinianism at the center of his disagreements with Lanfranc his former
teacher. Second, the period which covers the writing of the Monologion, the
Proslogion and Anselm's response to Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier near
Tours, who objected to some of Anselm's arguments in the Proslogion. And
third, the period beginning in the mid 1080s during which Anselm wrote his
De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli, and appears to have
taken to Augustine's anti-Pelagian works for further elaborations of his own
thought. While it is generally assumed that Anselm sought to respond to
current debates in the schools of northern France, I argue that Anselm may
in fact have been ahead of the schools in addressing difficulties which had
not been of much interest to his contemporaries, most of whom recognized the
eucharistic controversy as the most paramount theological problem of the
day, a controversy about which Anselm is silent. Anselm, for his part, took
up themes in his later works which became important topics for the early
twelfth century theologians. The Augustinianism of the twelfth century
theologians may owe something, then, to Anselm's influence, even when the
twelfth century theologians adopt positions which are not Anselm's.
-- Willis
> > On recent Anselmiana, please note the UPenn PhD dissertation by Felix
> Asiedu (currently in a post-doc fellowship at Villanova University)
> entitled "Anselm and the Augustinian Tradition: Deference and Innovation
> in the Eleventh Century" (1997). I don't have the chapter titles at hand,
> and don't recall whether Felix dealt specifically with issues of
> "spirituality," but he certainly has interests in such things. UPenn
> dissertation are available through University Microfilms (UMich).
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