A letter from Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury ()

Translated letter:

Anselm, unworthy bishop of the church of Canberbury: to the countess Matilda, worthy of reverence, greetings. It pleased your highness that I send her the Orationes which I produced for different brothers at their individual requests. Though there are some among them that are not appropriate to your person, I wanted to send them all so that, if they were pleasing to someone s/he could take them from this exemplar/copy.1 Since they were produced to excite the mind of the reader to the love or fear of god or to discussion of him, they should not be read swiftly or skimmed, but a little at a time with intense and lingering meditation. Nor should the reader attempt to read the whole of any of them, but only as much as s/he feels suffices to excite the desire to pray, which is what they were made for.

Original letter:

Anselmus, indignus Cantuariensis ecclesiae episcopus: reverendae comitissae Mathildi salutem. Placuit celsitudini vestrae ut Orationes, quas diversis fratribus secundum singulorum petitionem edidi, sibi mitterem. In quibus quamvis quaedam sint quae ad vestram personam non pertinent, omnes tamen volui mittere, ut, si cui placuerint, de hoc exemplari eas possit accipere. Quae quoniam ad excitandam legentis mentem ad Dei amorem vel timorem seu ad suimet discussionem sunt editae, non sunt legendae cursim vel velociter, sed paulatim cum itenta et morosa meditatione. Nec debet intendere lector quamlibet earum totam legere, sed tantum quantum ad excitandum affectum orandi, ad quod factae sunt, sentit sibi sufficere.

Historical context:

This is the letter Anselm wrote Matilda to accompany the book of prayers, Orationes, he said he was sending her in the previous letter. The letter gives Matilda the same kinds of instructions Anselm gives his other readers in his prologue, which this letter replaces in some of the manuscripts as it presumably did in the one the author sent the countess. The prologue says only a little more than the letter, that the prayers are not to be read in tumult but in quiet, as much as is needed, with god helping, to kindle the desire to pray or as much as pleases the reader, that one does not have to begin always at the beginning but wherever one wants, hence the division into parts and paragraphs, so he is not put off by frequent repetition. Some of the prayers in the Orationes appear for the first time in the version sent to Matida, see Marabelli, 122, 144.

Scholarly notes:

1. Mary Agnes Edsall has argued convincingly that "exemplar" is the preferable translation since what Anselm wants is for "readers of his prayers to be stimulated [to] their own acts of prayer -- whether these ended up composed in writing or not." See "Learning from the Exemplar: Anselm 's Prayers and Meditations and the Charismatic Text, Medieval Studies 72 (2010), 161-96, particularly 170-74.

Printed source:

Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1946-63), 3.4, also in Anselmo d’Aosta, Opere, Orazioni e Meditazioni, ed. Costante Marabelli, Italian translation Giorgio Maschio (Milano: Jaca Book, 1997), 120-21