Introduction

Summary

This volume takes up the story of the Bible where volume II left off, near the end of what is conventionally known as the Middle Ages in Europe. As that volume amply demonstrated, the Bible had saturated the intellectual, literary and artistic culture of Europe and the Near East for centuries, through its presence in Judaism, Christianity, and also in Islam. It had seen the rise of structures and systems that regulated the relationship between Scripture and people, and then the emergence of forces that challenged those systems. Progressively greater assertiveness on the part of the eleventh-century Roman papacy contributed to the mutual excommunications of 1054 and confirmed a long-standing trend for the cultures of the Greek East and the Latin West to diverge, though they never entirely lost contact. From the so-called Gregorian movement of the eleventh century in the Latin West, the clergy had distinguished itself from the laity by layers of sacramental and legal privilege. That separateness had contributed to an educational and scholarly system where the Bible was normally interpreted within cathedral, monastic and later university communities, all composed in one sense or another of ‘clergy’. The Bible remained the fundamental source text for both Christian theology and canon law in the Middle Ages. However, as both these disciplines developed their own superstructures of philosophical elaboration and circumstantial exegesis, the whole Bible had tended somewhat to recede into the background, reached through the filters and layers of tradition and authoritative interpretation rather than directly. That perceived ‘eclipse’ of the Scriptures helped to provoke movements of dissent and heresy by the end of the medieval period, though none of those offered a comprehensive replacement for the prevailing religious system. John Wyclif and Jan Hus challenged the academic mode of theology from within, to some extent in the name of Scripture and its authority. Similarly, movements of lay literacy and lay piety infringed or questioned the separation between the literate, Latin-reading clerical elite and the rest of the people. However, these challenges mitigated and challenged the structural exclusiveness of medieval religion: they did not bring about decisive structural change.