Acknowledgments ix
Acknowledgments Research on this work was supported very early on by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a full-year sabbatical grant from Boston College. I wish to thank my sponsor during my Humboldt year at the University of Freiburg, Professor Klaus Jacobi, the members of his seminar
Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter, and the participants in the culminating conference of the seminar on philosophical dialogue in the Middle Ages. These colleagues moved me to think about Anselm's dialogues and the spirit of dialogue throughout his corpus, and exposed me to the variety of dialogue forms in writers from Augustine to Erasmus. I am especially grateful to Professor Jacobi for his support during my year in Freiburg and beyond and for sharing his knowledge and insight on Anselm, as well as for recommending Anselm's prayers to me. In them I found a pattern of thought that opened up new ways of seeing Anselm's speculative writings. I wish to thank Professor Wayne Hankey, who invited me to present an early version of my thinking on the Proslogion at Dalhousie University; I am grateful to him and the members and students of the Classics department for their questions and suggestions. Similarly, I would like to thank the members of the Boston Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy, the Boston Colloquium in Historical Theology, and the Metaphysical Society of America for their comments on my presentations on Anselm. I am also grateful for other opportunities to present my work in progress on Anselm: at the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, the World Congress of the Societé Internationale pour l'Étude de Philosophie Médiévale in Palermo, and the conference, "On Language:
Analytic, Continental and Historical Perspectives," organized by the graduate students in the philosophy department at Boston College.
John Slotemaker, Jeffrey Witt, and Anna Djincharadze worked through many of Anselm's texts with me and offered many insights in a directed readings course. My colleagues, Stephen Brown, Sarah Byers, Paul Kolbet, JeanLuc Solère, and Boyd Taylor-Coolman answered with unerring expertise endless questions about Augustine and other elements of Anselm's background. I ix
acknowledgments have benefited from conversations with my colleagues and graduate students at Boston College, especially Richard Cobb-Stevens, Patrick Byrne, Richard Kearney, Lisa Cahill, Anne Davenport, Fred Lawrence, Ron Tacelli, SJ,
Oliva Blanchette, Jorge Garcia, Brian Braman, Arthur Madigan, SJ, Margaret Thomas, Maggie Labinski, John Manoussakis, Will Britt, Mark Thomas, and Matt Robinson.
Conversations with good friends and colleagues outside Boston College, both in medieval philosophy and other fields have had an important influence on my thinking; I mention especially Jack Zupko, Steve Marrone, Willemien Otten, Amy Whitworth, Babette Babich, Maria Carl, Kaye Slocum, Dallas Denery, Holly Johnson, Stan Benfell, Brigitte Saoma, Christian Brouwer,
Elzbieta Jung, Marek Gensler, and Rev. David Killian. Teresa Webber of Oxford University graciously responded to an email from a total stranger with helpful information about the dissemination of Augustine's Confessions and Commentary on the Psalms in English monasteries in the eleventh century, and more generally on the public and private practices of monastic reading in the period. Samu Niskanen of the University of Helsinki responded in a similar way to an email by sending me his entire dissertation on Anselm's letters and letter collections.
The conference commemorating the 900th anniversary of Anselm's death organized by Giles E. M. Gasper and Ian Logan at Canterbury in 2009 gave me the invaluable opportunity to learn from and talk about Anselm with them, as well as with Marilyn Adams, Toivo Holopainen, Peter Gemeinhardt, Burcht
Pranger, Sally Vaughn, Frederick van Fleteren, Jon Whitman, Arjo Vanderjagt, Hiroko Yamazaki, Jay Diehl, and many other participants. I am especially grateful to Giles Gasper for also inviting me to participate in a session on Anselm at Kalamazoo and for his careful and supportive reading of the manuscript as a reviewer for the Catholic University of America Press. He grasped, even when I had obscured it, the aim of the project as a whole and helped me see ways to make it clearer.
I have a debt I can never repay to Marcia Colish for her support of my work over many years and especially for her comments, suggestions, and corrections on the manuscript. I cannot express my immense gratitude for her generosity with her time and expertise and her patience with my mistakes and omissions. The same must be said of the many years of friendship, wisdom, and limitless generosity of Stephen Brown and Richard Cobb-Stevens. Richard Cobb-Stevens read and reread many passages with an eye toward the writing and accessibility to non-medievalists, and Steve Brown gave me superb advice about how to pursue the project in my own way. Their mentorship serves as a model I can only hope to emulate.
I thank in a particular way Patrick Byrne, who served as chair of the philosophy department at Boston College as I worked on this book. His supx
acknowledgments port for my work within the philosophy department, tireless advocacy of it to the administration, and his absolute confidence in my ability gave me tremendous comfort and served as a powerful impetus toward completion. Pat postponed fulfillment of some of his own ambitions to further mine and to serve the philosophy department.
I have benefited from the work of graduate research assistants Santiago Ramos, Anna Djincharadze, Kevin Rothman, and Susan Bencomo in collecting, checking, and rechecking references, index, and bibliography. I am very grateful to Christopher Fremaux, who helped immensely by working quickly and with great accuracy on the final check of quotes and references.
Very special thanks must be given to my good friend, Susan Bencomo, who kept correcting my mistakes in citation and format and served as an astute and wry commentator on the manuscript as a whole. Special thanks are due, as well, to James Kruggel of the Catholic University of America Press, for his advice and wise counsel and for responding to my many email inquiries with great grace and alacrity. Theresa Walker worked painstakingly to turn manuscript into book, overseeing all aspects of production; Susan Bond carefully edited my many ungainly sentences; I am greatly in their debt.
I heartily agree with the now overworked saying that "it takes a village to raise a child" but have come to realize quite concretely that it takes a fairly large village, at least for me, to write a book and raise children at the same time. Besides the many colleagues, students, and assistants, many friends and neighbors contributed to the raising of this book by helping raise my children during this period. I thank especially Rita Beckman, Linda Ratts,
Maureen Parsons, Laura Ongaro, Kari Hannibal, Hazel Sive, Andrew Lasser, and Purnima and Kaustubh Kambli for being the kind of friends of whom one could ask anything and at the last minute.
Finally, I am deeply moved by the love and support of my husband, Ira, and daughters, Mariel and Eliana, who endured my long hours, working evenings, weekends, holidays, and even on car trips. That it was a real sacrifice became quite clear when one small, worried voice, being told for the millionth time that I had to leave her side to work on the book, asked if I was going to write another book after this one. Her disappointment with the positive answer was palpable. Everyone, but especially my husband, heard me say too many times that I was "almost" finished. He humored me and did not murmur when "almost" proved painfully far from "finished." His love, confidence in me, and bottomless patience and support are great gifts in my life. xi