Anselm, a saint and doctor of the Latin church, born at Aosta in Piedmont about 1033, died in Canterbury, England, April 21, 1109. His youth was dissolute, until, at the age of 27, he entered the Benedictine monastery of Bee in Normandy, of which in 10(53 he succeeded Lanfranc as prior, and in 1078 became abbot. In 1092 he was invited to England, and in 1093 was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury as successor to his friend and master Lanfranc, since whose death in 1089 the see had been vacant. In this office he had several memorable conflicts with William Rufus and Henry L, especially on the subject of ecclesiastical investitures, and was deprived for a time of his bishopric, passing several years in France and Italy. Anselm is generally regarded as the earliest of the scholastic theologians. As a religious philosopher he had no superior in his own age, and few superiors in any age. His greatest works, and those which have won for him the surname of "the Augustine of the middle ages," are his treatise De Concordia Prœdesti-nationis, and the treatise Cur Deus Homo, in which he illustrates the doctrine of satisfaction, which has since his time ruled in the theory of the atonement.

The best and most complete edition of the works of Anselm is that issued in 1675 at Paris, under the direction of the Benedictine monk Gabriel Gerberon.