The Life and Times of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Britains

This two-volume biography, published in 1883 by the English Catholic scholar Martin Rule, is a full-scale life of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the Benedictine monk of Bec who became Archbishop of Canterbury under William Rufus and Henry I. Rule wrote it in the wake of several Anglican treatments of the saint, most notably R. W. Church's Saint Anselm (1870), and he wrote it to recover Anselm as the Victorian Church of England could not: as a Roman churchman whose two exiles were not the misfortunes of an unworldly scholar but the deliberate acts of a primate defending the liberty of the Church against the crown. The book was the fruit of years spent with the sources, and Rule went on the following year to edit Eadmer's Historia Novorum and Vita Anselmi for the Rolls Series.

The narrative follows Anselm from Aosta to Bec, where he studied under Lanfranc and rose to prior and abbot, and then to Canterbury, where the real argument of the book begins. Rule reconstructs in detail the confrontation with William Rufus at Rockingham in 1095 over the recognition of Pope Urban II, the first exile, Anselm's appearance at the Council of Bari in 1098, the investiture dispute with Henry I, the second exile, and the settlement of 1107. Throughout he leans on Eadmer, Anselm's own letters, and the chronicle and charter evidence, and he is willing to argue at length against earlier historians where he thinks they have misread a document or a motive. His central claim is that Anselm understood exactly what he was doing: that his refusals were principled, consistent, and politically coherent, and that his gentleness of temper has been mistaken for weakness. The theological works, Monologion, Proslogion, and Cur Deus Homo, are set within this life rather than treated apart from it, so that the man who argued that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived is the same man who would not hand the Church to a king.

Rule's book has not kept its place as the standard life; later scholarship, above all R. W. Southern's, works from the same sources with a steadier hand and far fewer pages. But it remains a monument of nineteenth-century Catholic historical writing in England, and its documentary thoroughness still rewards the patient reader. Its partisanship is open rather than hidden, which makes it easier to use than many more polished works.

Who should read this: readers who already know Anselm's thought and want the political and ecclesiastical story behind it, in full, from a writer who takes the Church's side without apology. It is not for someone seeking a brief introduction to Anselm, or for anyone who expects a modern critical biography; its length and its confessional loyalties are both considerable.