Anselm of Besate and Some North-Italian Scholars of the Eleventh Century

Abstract

Scholarly life in eleventh-century Italy comes to the notice of English historians chiefly in connexion with Lanfranc of Pavia, who (in a striking phrase of Dom David Knowles) ‘sought a career and found a vocation north of the Alps’, and with Anselm of Aosta, who succeeded him as prior of Bee and as archbishop of Canterbury. About their early education we know but little. However, the pattern of their lives—an education in north Italy, then travel to distant lands, and the eventual discovery there of an employment or vocation which would scarcely have been possible at home—was not untypical. I shall seek to describe the kind of north-Italian scholarly circles in which Lanfranc, in particular, grew up, with a view to illustrating how scholars were educated, their later careers, and their place in the history of medieval learning, culture and society. Thus we may hope to learn something about the Italian background of the two great Norman archbishops of Canterbury and, more generally, about the ecclesiastical life of north Italy which the Gregorian Reform would soon in such large measure sweep away.