Anselm of Laon

Anselm of Laon (Latin: Anselmus; d. 1117), properly Ansel (Ansellus), was a French theologian and founder of a school of scholars who helped to pioneer biblical hermeneutics.

[citation needed] The Liber Pancrisi (c. 1120) names him, with his brother Ralph, Ivo of Chartres, and William of Champeaux, as one of the four modern masters.

Anselm's greatest work, an interlinear and marginal gloss on the 'Scriptures', the Glossa ordinaria, now attributed to him and his followers,[2] was one of the great intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages.

[1] The significance of the gloss, which was most likely assembled after Anselm's death by his students, such as Gilbert de la Porrée, and based on Anselm's teaching, is that it marked a new way of learning — it represented the birth of efforts to present discrete patristic and earlier medieval interpretations of individual verses of Scripture in a readily accessible, easily referenced way.

This theme was subsequently adopted and extended by the likes of Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard and later Thomas Aquinas, who gave us 'handbooks' for what we would now call theology.