CMS is pleased to announce that Professor Alexander Andrée has been awarded a multiyear Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), to fund him and his students as he works on “Biblical Commentaries from the School of Laon in the Twelfth Century.”
In Professor Andrée’s own words: “This project aims to study the exposition and teaching of the Bible as it was performed at the cathedral school at Laon in the early twelfth century, and how this teaching influenced the development of theology that took place in the schools of Paris over the following decades. Its primary objectives are to uncover and define the biblical scholarship that was pursued at Laon and brought the school its fame in the early years of the twelfth century and, through this process, to recover the lost teaching of Anselm of Laon, the foremost master of the sacred page of his time, and thereby to re-evaluate the position of Anselm and his school in the theological movement of the twelfth century. The first objective builds on a thorough study of textual material, mainly biblical commentaries, that survive from Laon or are otherwise associated with the school; the second, issuing from and dependent on the first study, will be achieved through subjecting the unearthed material to internal and external textual criticism; the third objective, finally, will be reached through examining how the discovered material influenced prevailing streams of biblical exegesis and theology in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.” Congratulations!