into many languages. The final chapter of the book (a chapter dedicated to spirituality) has often been credited with helping to popularize the thesis that in the 11th century Anselm of Canterbury "was the founder of the new type of ardent and effusive self-disclosure", epitomizing a broader tendency to "a greater measure of solitude, of introspection, and self-knowledge" that "ran like fire through Europe in the generation after his death and produced an outburst of meditations and spiritual soliloquies". Southern's ideas were seminal for generations of scholars of medieval spirituality, helping them to build a picture of what they called affective piety – emotionally charged prayer and meditation mostly focused on the Passion of Christ. Southern made major contributions to the areas he studied, and was not afraid to attack long-held views. Southern's monographic studies of St Anselm and Robert Grosseteste, for example, have had significant influences on their historiography. Never afraid of controversy, Southern's interpretation of Grosseteste made a dramatic attempt to revise the chronology of Grosseteste's life. Further, Southern saw him as a particularly English figure (in contrast to earlier scholarship, which had seen Grosseteste's connections to French schools as being of particular importance). Southern also took a revisionist line in his re-interpretation of the School of Chartres, an argument stated first in his Medieval Humanism and then refined in his Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Southern argued that scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries had built the "School of Chartres" into a romanticised edifice out of all proportion with the documentary record. The figures in the School of Chartres were actually much more active in Paris than in Chartres itself, according to Southern; Chartres did indeed have a school, but it did not surpass the usual level of cathedral schools of the time. Southern's revisionist or iconoclastic approach was continued by some of his students. Valerie Flint, for example, attempted to make significant revisions to the interpretation of Anselm of Laon. Southern's final major work, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, was unfortunately destined to remain unfinished at his death. Southern never managed to finish the third volume of the work. The first two volumes do, however, represent a major contribution to medieval scholarship. In the work, Southern argues that, from the 12th century on, medieval scholars aspired to systematise all human knowledge in a comprehensive system. Furthermore, this scholarly vision (the