Afterword

Summary

The sixteenth century marked a watershed in the history of the Bible. The invention of the printing press in the previous century had profoundly altered notions of just what constituted a “text” and a “book.” Renaissance scholars no longer studied Hebrew and Greek as a way to correct the Latin Bible text as medieval scholars had done, but as a way to uncover the “original” Bible. The reformers challenged the authority of the Church to interpret this Bible and denied the validity of the medieval tradition of interpretation. Extra-biblical traditions, apocryphal texts, and mystical commentaries, once seen as essential to the understanding of the sacred text, came to be regarded as “monkish lore” and were dismissed as irrelevant. Although, of course, the achievements of the Renaissance and Reformation brought genuine improvements to the understanding of the Bible, one may ask whether they did not also obscure some essential elements of its history. This book has tried to recover some of this “lost” history of the Bible. I hope that it has provided students of medieval culture some insight into the peculiarities of the Bible as a sacred text and has shed some light on its place in medieval culture. But I also hope that it has done something to challenge the notion that the Middle Ages contributed little to our own understanding of the Bible.