| This dissertation re-examines the literary and theological influence of St. Anselm of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, on devotional literature in the vernacular languages of England, from the time of his death in the early twelfth century until the Reformation. The influence of Anselm in the religious experience of medieval men and women was vast: matching theological precision with emotional fervor, Anselm was among those authors of the twelfth-century renaissance who refashioned the depiction of Christ, emphasizing, not his triumphant victory on the cross, but rather his human sufferings. Some scholars, however, assume a crucial disjunction between Anselm's theological innovations and what became the dominant religious mode of the laity in late medieval Europe, arguing that the intellectual ambition of Anselm's works was misunderstood or betrayed, and replaced by a vernacular, feminized, exclusively emotive experience of faith.;In this dissertation I argue that these misunderstandings and betrayals constituted a distinct tradition in late medieval religious culture that can be called "Anselmian," by tracing the literary afterlife of Anselm's Proslogion. The Proslogion has been neglected in medieval intellectual history because it is assumed that it was little read after Anselm's death, and certainly not by lay or female readers. The work was, however, widely disseminated and translated into the vernacular literatures of England in excerpted form: the fourteen joys of heaven described in the final two chapters were so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible, and in this way, the Proslogion made a place for intellectual engagement in the religious experience of women and the laity. Anselm's joys of heaven appear in a wide range of devotional works in the vernacular, in the literature composed for female recluses, such as Ancrene Wisse and Sawles Warde, in pastoral literature such as Robert Grosseteste's Chasteu D 'amur, and in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love. Analyses of these works demonstrate precisely how vernacular literature was capable of communicating key components of twelfth-century theology to a non-Latinate, often non-literate, audience. |
