ANSELMO da BESATE, called the PERIPATETIC.—A wandering master of the 11th century, one of the earliest representatives of the re-emergent dialectic in the early scholastic period. Of his life it is known only that he belonged to a noble family from Besate (Pavia); that he was a member of the Milanese clergy; that his teachers in the liberal arts were Drogone of Parma and Sichalmo of Reggio Emilia; and that he travelled through Italy, Burgundy, and southern Germany, going as far as Mainz and Bamberg, everywhere displaying his dialectical skill and asserting its remarkable demonstrative capacities, even with regard to the truths of the faith.
His teaching has come down to us in a curious work, halfway between logic and polemical autobiography, entitled Rhetorimachia, initially dedicated to his teacher Drogone and subsequently to the emperor Henry II, under whose successor he held the office of court chaplain. In this work, written in a convoluted and bombastic style, he develops the Ciceronian theory of the fundamental importance of rhetoric, flaunts his erudition in the arts of the trivium, and discusses in particular the applicability of the logical principle of contradiction also within the sphere of dogmatic doctrines. The sources of his dialectic are the same as those of his learned contemporaries, such as Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) and Fulbert, founder of the school of Chartres: Porphyry’s Igogge, the Aristotelian writings on the Categories and the De interpretatione, and finally the logical treatises of Severinus Boethius.
Compared with the other dialecticians of the period (also called « philosophers », « sophists », and « peripatetics » in a more or less ironic and disparaging sense), who, like the ancient sophists of Greece, travelled through their countries demonstrating their rationalistic prowess and asserting its character as the exclusive and supreme norm of knowledge, including in matters of faith, and therefore even above Sacred Scripture and the Fathers, he is distinguished by a certain moderation, despite the one-sided prominence he gives to dialectic. Nevertheless, the vigorous reaction of the conservative « antidialectical » thinkers, particularly St. Peter Damian, was directed against him as well, since he was confused with the « sophists » of the period, whose most representative figure was Berengar of Tours.