Anima mea. Prières privées et textes de dévotion du Moyen Age latin

St. Anselm of Canterbury's († 1109) Orationes siue Meditationes offers a most instructive testimony of the change that occurred in the late eleventh century in Western spirituality. Thanks to the beauty of its language and the freshness of its approach, Anselm's volume truly touched the minds of contemporaries and aroused so great a passion that the book was copied, imitated, and incorporatedinto apocryphal collections. These new books illustrate by their variety, originality, and even commonplace aspects the profuse resources of a literary genre that is too often unrecognized although most deserving of interest. After exposing the political and religious background of the Anglo-Norman world, as well as treating the rhetorical tradition of private prayers, the present work offers the first critical edition, with a French translation, of the Anselmian collections of the 12th century.