Anselm of Laon

Anselm was born at Laon, in northern France, probably in the middle of the eleventh century. He may have studied under Anselm of Canterbury at Bec; the sources are not certain. By about 1100 he was running the cathedral school at Laon with his brother Ralph, and it had become the leading school of theology in Europe. Students came from everywhere. He was called doctor scholasticus and, by some, the tongue of Augustine.

He died on 15 July 1117.

His method was to teach Scripture by working through the text and setting beside it what the fathers had said, and, where the fathers disagreed, by framing the disagreement as a question and working toward an answer. Those questions, written down by his students, are the sententiae, and they are the seed of scholastic theology. Peter Lombard's Sentences, the textbook every medieval theologian had to lecture on, grows directly out of what was being done in Anselm's classroom.

His larger monument is the Glossa ordinaria.

A medieval Bible page did not look like ours. It had the sacred text down the middle in a large hand, and around it, in smaller writing between the lines and in both margins, a standing commentary drawn from Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, Bede, and the Carolingians. That apparatus is the Gloss, and it was the ordinary way Scripture was studied in Europe for four hundred years. When a scholastic writes that Scripture says something, he very often means the Gloss says it.

The Gloss was not one man's book. It grew over generations. But the work of assembling it began at Laon under Anselm, he and his circle glossed the Psalter, the Pauline epistles, and John, and his pupils, Gilbert of Auxerre and Peter Lombard among them, carried it on until the whole Bible was covered. For centuries the compilation was credited to Walafrid Strabo; modern scholarship traced it back to Anselm's school.

He is also remembered for a famous student who could not stand him. Peter Abelard came to Laon about 1113, decided the old master was all leaves and no fruit, said so, and offered to lecture on Ezekiel himself with no preparation. He did, brilliantly, and was thrown out. Abelard's account is the one most people have read. It is one clever young man's opinion of a teacher whose life work was to make Scripture readable for everyone else.

Sources: Glossa ordinaria (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vols. 113–114); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).