Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

For a long time, even in the scholarly world, the history of the Bible in the Middle Ages was thought to be a field that held little interest except for a small group of specialists. This began to change shortly after World War II, with three important, almost simultaneous publications: in 1946, Ceslas Spicq published his Esquisse d'une histoire de l'exégèse latine au Moyen Âge (Sketch of a History of Latin Exegesis in the Middle Ages), a concise survey of medieval biblical exegesis. Spicq's Esquisse was almost exclusively based on a survey of the texts he found in Jean-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, a comprehensive printed edition of Latin patristic and medieval church writers from Tertullian (second century c.e.) to Innocent III (1215). For the period after the latter, Spicq limited himself to the few authors whose work was edited, while providing a handlist of authors whose work was available in manuscript only. In 1952, Beryl Smalley published her Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, an epoch-making work, which showed that serious textual biblical studies began not with the Enlightenment but much earlier, in the Carolingian period, and reached an intellectual peak in the twelfth century. In contrast to Spicq, Smalley's work ventured into the vast array of unprinted texts in medieval collections, uncovering sometimes surprising aspects of medieval biblical scholarship and putting half-forgotten authors, such as Andrew of Saint Victor, back into the limelight. Like Spicq, however, Smalley left the work of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century exegetes largely unexplored. Between 1959 and 1964, Henri de Lubac published his magisterial four-volume Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’écriture (Medieval Exegesis. The Four Senses of Scripture), in which he demonstrated that the rich spiritual tradition of medieval exegesis had relevance for twentieth-century theology. In fact, Lubac argued, modern theology might have omitted an essential Christian element by discarding the patristic and medieval traditions of interpretation and one-sidedly embracing the Enlightenment historical-critical method. Since then, medieval exegesis has been a subject of serious scholarly attention and reappreciation.