ANSELM of NONANTOLA, St. — Former Duke of Friuli, brother of Giseltruda, wife of the Lombard king Aistulf. Having embraced the monastic life, he received from Aistulf in 749 the present-day Fanano as a donation, where he founded a monastery and a hospice, and in 751–52 the territory of Nonantola (q.v.), upon which he erected the famous monastery of the same name and a church dedicated to all the Holy Apostles, consecrated on 9 June 753 by Archbishop Sergius of Ravenna. The author of the *Life* mentions three other monastic and hospice foundations at Sant’Ambrogio in the Vicentino and in the place called *Susonia*.
While with his brother-in-law Aistulf at the siege of Rome in 756, Anselm removed from the cemetery basilica of Priscilla part of the body of Pope St Sylvester, which he placed in the church of the monastery of Nonantola, where he had an oratory and an altar dedicated in honour of the aforesaid Pontiff on 20 November of the same year by Bishops Romanus of Bologna and Apollinaris of Reggio. From that moment the monastery, besides its original title of the Holy Apostles, was also called by the name of St Sylvester. The historicity of this translation, attested by genuine ancient sources but later distorted by later ones, cannot be doubted, even though the *Liber Pontificalis* of Rome (cf. ed. Duchesne, I, p. 464) states that Paul I transferred the body of St Sylvester within the city in 761. Bortolotti, whom De Rossi (letter to Bortolotti) dissents from, reconciles the two traditions by the truly reasonable hypothesis that Anselm would have brought to Nonantola not the whole body but only part of it, so that Paul I in 761 could transfer the remainder into the city. The sources speak in both cases of the body, but it is evidently a case of the part for the whole.
Anselm was exiled to Monte Cassino for seven years by King Desiderius, probably because he was a supporter of Rachis; released, it is believed, about 764, he returned to Nonantola with a rich haul of codices and resumed the direction of the abbey, which he governed until his death on 3 March 803.
The *Life* of Anselm, entitled *Actus vel transitus beati Anselmi Abbatis*, written most probably in the first half of the 11th century, is a composition in which commonplaces abound and historical information is scarce, sometimes even interpolated, despite the genuine sources used by the author.