Abstract
Given that the Latin text of the Bible remained, broadly speaking, constant in the period covered by this volume, it must be reasonable to ask why we might expect there to be anything other than continuity in the Bible and its interpretation in the thirteenth century, why there should be change. In order to address this question, we need also to step back and consider the antecedence of “the thirteenth century” of this volume; that is, a period of development and consolidation that sets thirteenth-century France as the stage on which a new and important play will be enacted. For each of the different topics dealt with in this book, the key points at which change happens, or the spread of time over which we can see a sustained change occurring, will be different; for each, there is a different point—beyond the literal—where this conceptual thirteenth century begins. For scholars of the Bible and exegesis, it is impossible to consider the situation at the beginning of the thirteenth century without keeping in mind the innovations of what is generally described as the twelfth-century renaissance.1 Indeed, it is tempting to begin the “biblical” thirteenth century around 1110 and to run it forward till around 1340; and, although we will resist that temptation, nevertheless, we cannot ignore the twelfth-century changes altogether.
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Notes
The term became common after Charles Homer Haskins published The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century in 1927 (Cambridge, MA), and is echoed in the excellent volume of essays published to celebrate Haskins’s contribution, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Oxford, 1982). A more recent account of the subject and bibliography is given by Robert N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, NY, 1999).
For accounts of the schools and the early university systems, see Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, rev. and ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden (Oxford, 1936);
Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York, 1968); the essays by Jean Leclercq, Richard W. Southern, John W. Baldwin, Nikolaus M. Häring, and Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal;
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1983);
Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992);
John van Engen, ed., Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University (Notre Dame, 2000).
For the text (Latin and English) of the Fourth Lateran decrees, see Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (London and Washington, 1990), 227–271.
For Honorius’s prohibition see Henrich Denifle and Aemilio Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris, 1889–1897), 1:32. For the mendicants in the schools, see Smalley, The Study of the Bible;
M. Michèle Mulchahey, “The Dominican Studium System and the Universities of Europe in the Thirteenth Century,” in Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les universités médiévales, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1994), 277–324;
and Mulchahey, “First the Bow Is Bent in Study…”. Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto, 1998);
Bert Roest, A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210–1517) (Leiden and Boston, 2000).
For a short readable account of this history, see Christopher. F. R. de Hamel, The Book. A History of the Bible (London and New York, 2001), and his bibliography for the Introduction and ch. 1. Cassiodorus describes a copy of the Bible divided into nine volumes (Genesis to Ruth; Kings and Chronicles; Prophets; Psalms; Wisdom; the “biographies,” Job, Tobit, Esther, Judith, Maccabees, Ezra-Nehemiah; Gospels; Epistles; Acts and Revelation), but there was no single agreed division; indeed, Carolingian library catalogues can use the Latin bibliotheca (library) for a complete copy of the Bible.
See Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden and Boston, 2009).
Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2000), and see their essay in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal; see also Mulchahey, “Dominican Studium System.”
Smalley, Study of the Bible, 331–337; Laura Light, “Versions et révisions du texte biblique,” in, Le Moyen Âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon, Bible de tous les temps 4 (Paris, 1984), 5–93;
Lesley Smith, “What Was the Bible in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries?” in Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. Robert E. Lerner (Munich, 1996), 1–15;
Gilbert Dahan, “La critique textuelle dans les correctoires de la Bible du XIIIe siècle,” in Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet, ed. A. de Libera et al. (Paris, 1997), 365–392;
Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris, 1999), 272–285;
Lesley Smith, “Hugh of St. Cher and Medieval Collaboration,” in Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, ed. Franklin T. Harkins (Notre Dame, 2010), 241–264.
Peter Lombard, Magistri Petri Lombardi … Sententiae in IV Libris Distinctae, ed. I. C. Brady, 3 vols (Grottaferrata, 1971);
see also, for example, Cédric Giraud, “Per verba magistri”: Anselme de Laon et son école au XIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2010)
and Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae Petri Pictaviensis, ed. Philip S. Moore and Marthe Dulong (Notre Dame, reprinted 1961).
Augustine: Sermon 8 on the Ten Plagues of Egypt (De decem plagis aegyptorum et decem praeceptis legis); Sermon 9 on the Ten Strings of the Harp (De decem chordis), in Sancti Aurelii Augustini. Sermones de vetere testamento, ed. C. Lambot, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 41 (Turnhout, 1961). For further discussion, see Lesley Smith, The Ten Commandments: Interpreting the Bible in the Medieval World, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 175 (Leiden and Boston, 2014).
In fact, there were also debates among the Jews; but Christians recognized a single Jewish position as reported by Philo Judaeus, On the Decalogue, ed. F. H. Colson, The Works of Philo Judaeus, 7 (London and Cambridge, MA, 1937).
Hugh of St. Cher (ca. 1190–1263) joined the Dominican Order in 1225 or 1226 and was one of its greatest early scholars and administrators, becoming the first Dominican cardinal in 1244. His writings are prodigious. There is no modern edition of his great biblical commentary, the Postilla in totam bibliam, but there are several early printed copies (see B. Carra de Vaux, “La constitution du corpus exégétique,” Annexe 1, in Hugues de Saint-Cher († 1263): Bibliste et théologien, ed. L. -J. Bataillon, G. Dahan, and P. -M. Gy (Turnhout, 2004), 43–63, at 56–57). I have used the Paris, 1533 edition. Alexander of Hales (ca. 1185–1245) was an English theology master, teaching in Paris; he joined the Franciscans in 1236. He is credited with introducing Lombard’s Sentences as a compulsory element of the Paris theology syllabus. Alexander of Hales, Glossa in quatuor libros sententiarum, Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica Medii Aevi, 14 (Quaracchi, 1954), 3: lib. 3, dd. 37–40.
Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170–1253) came to theology only after studying science. He taught theology to the Franciscans in Oxford (although a secular cleric himself), but we know nothing of his own theological education: he may have been self-taught. Robert Grosseteste, De decem mandatis, ed. Richard C. Dales and E. B. King, Auctores Britannici medii aevi 10 (Oxford, 1987).
Much more material exists by thirteenth-century biblical and theological scholars than by those of the twelfth century. Apart from chance, and the increasing amount of material from each century closer to the present, this may also be because twelfth-century scholars worked in a predominantly oral teaching culture and did not expect to “publish” their works. See Michael Clanchy and Lesley Smith, “Abelard’s Description of the School of Laon: What Might It Tell Us about Early Scholastic Teaching?” Nottingham Medieval Studies 54 (2010): 1–34.
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Smith, L. (2015). Continuity and Change in the Study of the Bible: The Ten Commandments in Christian Exegesis. In: Baumgarten, E., Galinsky, J.D. (eds) Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317582_2
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