Saint Anselm of Canterbury / M. R.
The prayers and meditations that pass under the name of Saint Anselm were, in his own age and long after, among the best-loved of all Latin devotions. Anselm composed prayers to God, to Christ, to our Lady, and to the saints, and sent them to those who asked, that they might warm the heart to compunction and love; and he divided them, he tells us, into short sections, 'that the reader may break off wherever he wishes.'Here are the twenty-one meditations of the traditional collection, complete, in the translation of M. R. (1872). A number are Anselm’s own; others, as later scholarship has shown, belong to his disciples and imitators, and to earlier writers whom the manuscript tradition set beside him. They are gathered here as generations of the faithful received them; and whoever their author, they have carried souls to God for eight hundred years.
