Anselm of Besate


Anselm of Besate was an 11th-century churchman and rhetorician.
Anselm was born at Besate, near Pavia, to a notable local family shortly after the year 1000. He received his education in Padua and Reggio, and became attached to the church of Milan. He later served in the chapel of the Emperor Henry III. Around 1047, he composed the Rhetorimachia and dedicated it to Henry III. It is one of the first works on rhetoric to appear in western Europe after Rabanus Maurus' De institutione clericorum of 819. It is a treatise in three books, ostensibly a letter to his nephew Rutiland to correct his confusion about rhetoric. The main targets of Anselm's rhetoric are magic and clerical vice, but he also attacks logic. To some scholars it represents a continuation of the Ciceronian tradition, or its rediscovery in 11th-century Italy, but to others it is "unlike anything that went before" and represents the birth of a new medieval "art of controversy". It has received two critical editions.

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