Six down, one to go


The initial capital from On the Procession
of the Holy Spirit, which goes unmentioned
in the book (Bodl. 271 f 109r). 'N' of course
stands for New York.
Getting away to a place where I had nothing to do but write during the day and catch up with friends in the evening has proved to be more productive even than I had hoped. Last week I wrote the chapter on the fall of the angels. On Monday, thanks to the realization that I basically had already written the Atonement chapter, I finished that chapter as well. (Copy-and-paste plus maybe three hours of editing was all it took.)

That means yesterday I started chapter 7, "Life in the meantime." This one may take a while longer because I don't have a clear plan for it, just a jumble of themes: living on the knife-edge between heaven and hell, the central concepts of obedience and order, grace, what goes on in the prayers and meditations, why Anselm thinks you definitely shouldn't marry your late husband's brother who has the same name as your late husband ("This is my husband Darryl; this is my other husband Darryl"). But I'm confident now that I can have the whole MS to the press by the contractual delivery date of 1 September, which is amazing and unexpected.

Also on that date I am supposed to hand off my MS of Anselm: The Complete Treatises Plus Other Stuff You Might Find Interesting. My editing and proofreading have brought me to p. 51 of 843. The less said about that, the better.

*****

And now an unabashed bleg:

The Very Short Introduction series is meant for "a combination of general readers, students (both at school and university)[,] and scholars in related fields. The typical reader is educated and interested, but not a specialist" ("Instructions for Authors"). If I have any readers who fit that description and would be interested in giving me feedback on all or part of my VSI, I'd be very grateful. The whole MS will be no more than 35,000 words, or about 130 double-spaced pages. I'll get reports from the press as well and can take all the feedback into account in doing my final revisions, which are due no later than 1 January 2022.

Here's the table of contents, with brief descriptions of the chapters:

1    Anselm's life, work, and contexts (biographical chapter with stuff about Anselm's intellectual, monastic, political, and public contexts)

2    Looking at God (building up the picture of the divine nature)

3    Looking for God (establishing the existence of the God described in chapter 3)

4    How things got started (creation, the Word, truth)

5    How things went wrong (freedom and the fall)

6    The great restoration project (Atonement)

7    Life in the meantime (grace, ethics, prayer, just generally appropriating the finished work of Christ)

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