Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury from 1093-1109, formerly of the abbey of Bec in Normandy, is here represented by an example of his more intimate writing, namely an exquisite short letter to his dear friend Gundulf, and by an excerpt from his great work, the Proslogion, an address to God in which Anselm meditates on the existence and nature of God and man’s relation to God in a Latin prose studded with Biblical references particularly from the Psalms.

Goscelin was born in Flanders but spent most of his life in monasteries in England. He was a great writer of biographies of saints, particularly of early Saxon women. His Book of Consolation is a wonderfully imaginative work addressed to a woman whom he loved after meeting her at Wilton Abbey before she was sent to a monastery in Gaul. Goscelin speaks much of spiritual friendship and the spiritual life, quotes from Christian and classical text and includes fascinating details about medieval life.

In the devotional works of Aelred of Rievaulx, a rhetorical trope that properly characterizes the oblique indictment of vice functions instead to draw the reader toward awareness of unfulfilled and quite literally unspeakable possibilities of men dwelling together in a blessedness of charity that welcomes embodied desire as a resource of the spirit. Aelred’s gestures toward the unspoken, throughout the corpus of his devotional writings, open up a space where ointment, mingled with unabashedly shed tears, drips over the feet of the enfleshed Christ, where the devotee licks the dust from his feet, where the companions of the twelve-year old Jesus swoon over his beauty, and where men united in the common life of a monastic community long in their imaginations for physical embrace, in imitation of the Beloved Disciple.