My summer with Anselm

Anselm presiding over my study

(Warning: This is a pretty boring post. But it will set me up for some decently interesting posts later on.)

I'm spending the whole summer with Anselm.

I have two projects due at the end of the summer. The first is a slender (indeed, skinny) monograph, Anselm: A Very Short Introduction, for Oxford University Press; the first draft of that is due August 1. The second is a rather large volume of translations, Anselm: The Complete Treatises, for Hackett Publishing Company; the final draft of that is due September 1.

The translations are actually all finished. Most of them have appeared in Anselm: Basic Writings, which the Complete Treatises will replace, and the rest (amounting to about 150 closely printed pages) is all at least drafted, and a fair bit of it is fully polished. So that part is fairly low-key.

The VSI, by contrast, is getting written from scratch. If you don't know the Very Short Introduction series, you should; they're quite a good way into a new topic, written by experts for intelligent and curious non-specialists. They're physically small, and they have to be between 30,000 and 35,000 words -- a quite manageable size for the reader, but a challenge for scholars who want to say absolutely everything there is to say about even the smallest topics. The discipline imposed by the word count, and by the imperative to avoid jargon and technicality, is very salutary.

To finish on time, I need to write about 2500 words a week -- not a huge amount, but enough that some self-imposed discipline is needed. So I thought a little blogging might help. If I post progress reports (preferably in the form of scintillating passages drawn from the day's successful work), I should have an easier time keeping on track.

Here's the table of contents:

1        Anselm's life, works, and contexts
2        Looking at God
3        Looking for God
4        How things got started
5        How things went wrong
6        The great restoration project

I'm saving Chapter 1 for last so that I can reread all the biographical stuff in the meantime. (I can never keep all that in my head.) Chapter 2, on Anselm's account of the divine nature, is drafted. Chapter 3, chiefly on the "ontological argument," is just underway. Chapter 4 is on creation, chapter 5 on freedom, sin, and the fall, and chapter 6 on Atonement.

According to the work schedule I have drawn up, I am ending the week just slightly ahead. This makes me hopeful.