Lesser Feasts

Sir David Young Cameron, Cliffs and Crags of Ross Chapter 1 is drafted! I haven't read through it from start to finish, and I have a feeling it will need a good bit of revision. The organization is a bit weird: the thematic treatment gives way to a chronological treatment about halfway through. And I forget to mention Anselm's actual writings during a decade or two. But it's drafted, on time, and the hard part -- reminding myself of the historical tidbits and then figuring out how to craft them into something cohesive, with the right amount of detail -- is done. I hope I've managed to convey something of Anselm's complex character, which is intriguing and has given rise to strikingly different readings in his recent(ish) biographers. I find myself increasingly drawn to Sally Vaughn's portrait of Anselm. Her Anselm is less baffled, less overwhelmed, a better tactician and administrator than Sir Richard Southern and Gillian Evans credit him with being. Yet she nev...

The incipit of Anselm's letter On the Incarnation of the Word (Bodleian Library, MS 271, c. 1100-1140) I'm roughly halfway finished, I think. I've written three and a half of seven chapters, 18,000 words of no more than 35,000. I was a week late with my list of illustrations, and I may well be a week or two late with the final manuscript (due September 1), but that's close enough. In last week's entry  I told the story of how Anselm reluctantly became archbishop of Canterbury. One of the threads in that story is Anselm's life as a monk, and I spent most of this week trying to figure out something illuminating to say about how his monastic profession shaped Anselm's life and thought. This turned out to be rather tricky. It's not as if there's anything in his treatises to which you can point and say, "Only a monk could have written that" (with the obvious exception of the bits where he says that he wrote a given work at the request of his bro...

James Paterson, Edinburgh from Craigleith This painting is part of an exhibition of the Glasgow Boys at The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. (A lot of my images lately have been from that exhibition.) I had hoped to see it in person, but it closes a week from today, and restrictions on travel from the US to Scotland are still too prohibitive. I won't make it to Scotland at all this summer, but I'm taking a few days to get a change of scenery a little closer to home, including a week to ten days of focused work at the library at General Theological Seminary. My main job this week was to get started on Chapter 1, "Anselm's life, work, and contexts." I was planning to save it for last because it will be the most difficult to write, but after drafting Chapters 2-4 I realized that I need the first chapter to make my list of illustrations, which currently requests "a map or maps including all the places mentioned in Chapter 1." That list is due to the press, wel...

  James Watterston Herald, Hospitalfield  (1888) I keep posting images of Scottish art: things I've looked at, things I would have liked to buy (if only they hadn't been impossibly expensive), things I actually tried to buy but someone pushed the bidding up way too high (like the Madonna I posted a few days ago, which sold this morning while I was asleep for almost half again as much as I was willing to pay). This morning I finally managed to buy a piece of Scottish art, this lovely watercolor by James Watterston Herald (1859-1914).

Madonna , William Crosbie Chapter 4 is done! Or drafted, anyway. True, a captious reader might note that I introduce the doctrine of the Trinity but fail to get around to the Holy Spirit. ("No, we have never even heard that there is  a Holy Spirit.") And there's definitely other work to be done. But still, it feels good to have three of seven chapters drafted. Wait (you may be saying to yourself): I thought you said Chapter 4 is done. Quite right. I haven't written Chapter 1, which is the biographical/contextual/historical bit that I can't do as easily off the top of my head. That has to be next, though, because I have to submit my list of illustrations on July 15, and that list includes a request for "a map of all the places mentioned in Chapter 1," which in the absence of Chapter 1 is not a super-helpful directive. I also ask for a picture of a manuscript and make several suggestions. Here's one I particularly like, from an early MS of Anselm's...

Sir William George Gillies, "Moorfoot" (1961) I was about two weeks behind at the beginning of the week. Now I'm just a day or two behind. I accomplished this feat by revising my schedule, frankly, though I did get a bit of work done as well. The path I'm trying to take is somewhat winding: I have to get from creation to the Word to the "truth" of creatures without losing anyone along the way. I'm still figuring out how to finesse that turn from the Word to creatures, but once that's done, the rest of the chapter will write itself. And the next chapter, about freedom and the fall, should also be easy. In addition to working on Anselm, I led a Bible study on Revelation 11:19-15:4. It was a lot of material, and I thought I could cover it best by focusing on three passages that introduce characters who play a major role in that part of the vision. I found some nice images, which I might as well pass along. We first read about the woman, the child, and t...