Notes on Medieval Biblical Studies, Part 1
The Value of Preservation
(avg. read time: 3–5 mins.)
My series on textual criticism led me to thinking more about the medieval era I mentioned but did not engage with in any depth. Of all the great eras of biblical scholarship and biblical teaching, the one most likely to be overlooked, especially by the average student of biblical studies, is the medieval era. As the name implies, it sits in this middle area that makes it rather easy to overlook. The patristic era was formative in some obvious (and some not-so-obvious) ways in the solidification of orthodoxy, the canon, and the development of hermeneutical patterns that resonate to this day, all in an era where debates with those identified as heretics were a crucial catalyst. The Reformation era of course gave rise to many denominational traditions seeking to differentiate themselves from the Roman Catholic Church (and, secondarily, the Eastern Orthodox) in how they approached Scripture and how they received it. Many regard the writings of key figures in this era—including Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and many others less well-known—as insightful to this day. The modern era (and its postmodern derivative) has been formative in ways that are more immediately obvious (as well as, again, ways that are not so immediately obvious). Each subject addressed in this era has accumulated scholars that are widely considered as necessary to address for anyone wanting to understand and contribute to that subject.
But what about the medieval era? It was not formative in the way that the patristic era was. In fact, as I discuss further below, much medieval scholarship was dedicated to preserving, repeating, and applying patristic teaching on the Bible. The Reformation era in many ways marked a major break with the medieval era, and the Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation sides of the response from the Roman Catholics involved less appeal to medieval tradition in its approach to the Bible than to patristic tradition. The modern era carried the Protestant break with the medieval era further by regularly disdaining it, and Protestants who often conflicted with modern skeptics were rarely eager to defend medieval scholarship in the process.
Today, I want to explore this overlooked era of biblical scholarship, examine its characteristics (both good and bad), and show how it is more valuable and influential than we often give it credit for being. In the process, I hope I can also go some way in correcting misconceptions about it. My guide for making these notes on medieval scholarship will be Beryl Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, and I will supplement it where I am able. I focus here on medieval Europe, as medieval Byzantium, its empire, the developments of the East, and the interactions of the East with Muslims would require a series to themselves, and I need to develop greater familiarity with them first. Finally, this is not so much going to be a properly structured multi-part essay as a series of notes on the subject.
Textual Criticism and Preservation
I quote here the notes I made previously about medieval textual criticism:
Textual criticism would continue to be practiced in pre-Renaissance scholarship by the likes of Nicholas of Lyra, Peter Lombard, Theodulf, Stephen Harding, and the Victorine school in general. Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, which was the most popular medieval biblical introduction for university students, as well as Franciscan and Dominican friars, included instruction on textual criticism (especially in terms of accounting for every possible variant as providing insight into the Scripture). Nicholas Manjacoria likewise composed rules for proper procedure in textual criticism. Dominican and Franciscan friars trained by these people, most famously Roger Bacon, in turn composed correctoria to list corrections of the Latin Vulgate. However, two major differences separate the attempts to establish the correct reading in medieval scholarship from similar efforts in Renaissance and post-Renaissance scholarship. First, medieval efforts were primarily directed at the OT, drawing from the Hebrew text (one of the results of frequent contact with Jews in Europe). Second, any textual criticism of the NT still meant working primarily with the Latin. Greek New Testament manuscripts would not become widely available to western European scholars until after the Fall of Byzantium and the consequent emigration of Greek scholars westward and the invention of the printing press around the same time.
Although later textual criticism would take different directions from the medieval textual critics, it is worth acknowledging that they kept the art alive. This activity, especially as expressed in charting and accounting for the variants, was of one piece with a quality of the medieval era in general: the propensity to preserve.
The medieval era is often maligned, in some cases rightly, for its destructive tendency when it came to the works of those deemed heretics. But alongside this tendency was also the tendency to preserve that which had come before the era. Contemporary heretics were condemned and subject to punishment by the Church-State (the two were distinguishable but hardly separable in this era), but ancient pagans whose works had stood the test of time thus far were considered worth preserving. After the civilizational crash that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, many in the medieval era sought all the more to preserve what had come before. Even beyond the pagans who composed what are often defined as “the classics,” medieval scribes sought to preserve stories of the ancient non-Christian past. This is an aspect that I will address in more depth when I discuss the relationship of Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet, but it is worth noting for now as part of the legacy we owe to the medieval era. Without the many, mostly unknown, scribes and scholars who worked to preserve what they could of the pre-medieval world, much would have been lost to us, including works of biblical commentary and biblical manuscripts.