Samu Niskanen

Jesus College

Research Interests

I am preparing a new critical edition of the correspondence of Saint Anselm (d. 1109). Anselm’s correspondence, including more than 400 letters, encapsulates the man. The letters are an important witness to his mind in a historical context, illuminating his monastic teaching, intellectual development and his position in the disputes between king and pope. Thus my research has strong interdisciplinary features, involving the disciplines of history, theology and philosophy. It is in the nature of my subject that I have a particular interest in textual criticism and manuscript studies. The first volume, to be accomplished in 2011, will include 147 letters from Anselm’s Bec years and a historical commentary on the letters. I mostly work on twelfth century manuscripts but I have also edited documents from fourteenth and fifteenth century papal registers. A further field of interest is the collection of medieval manuscript fragments in the National Library of Finland, comprising 11000 fragments. My analyses on the palaeographical and codicological evidence from the earliest layers of the collection reveal that English influence on the Christianization of Finland was stronger than has hitherto been understood.

Projects and Publications

'St Anselm’s views on Crusade’, Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen et al. (Helsinki, 2005), pp. 64–70.
with Tuomas Heikkilä), Euroopan synty – Keskiajan historia (Helsinki, 2004). [Textbook on medieval history.]
with Tuomas Heikkilä and Outi Merisalo), ‘Taavi Hahl ed i fonti della Finlandia medievale’, Classiconorroena 19 (2002), pp. 1–9.
The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury, PhD, to be published in 2010.