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A final key aspect of medieval biblical scholarship is the role it had in medieval education. In the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church in its various manifestations became the sole entity responsible for education. Of course, education at this time was still the reserve of the elites and others of means. Likewise, education on the subject of the Bible was for the clergy, which was aided by keeping the Scriptures in Latin for liturgy, instead of translating them into the vernacular (that is, once Latin was no longer the vernacular, as the Vulgate itself was a vernacular translation). This was not as much of a problem outside of the realms of the old Roman Empire, where some of the oldest surviving written documents in a given language were Bible translations. There were some translation projects in the lands of the old Roman Empire, such as the partial translations of some books into Old English, but most of the proper Bibles in vernacular, mostly those derived from Latin called the “Romance languages,” did not emerge until the 13th century. But as is well known, some of these translation projects, such as the Wycliffe Bible, would cause significant controversy, and the institutional preference remained for teaching the Bible and receiving Scripture in liturgy through Latin.
The more accessible option for education, from a socio-economic perspective that is, was actually the monastery, though its “price” came more in terms of the kind of life one needed to dedicated oneself to in order to remain. Alongside the monastic schools were the cathedral schools, which educated clergy and also provided training for choirs. The cathedral schools would also expand education for children of nobility who were not interested in becoming part of the clergy. Beginning in the late 11th century, there also arose the medieval universities, including some that still exist today, such as the University of Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Modena, Salamanca, Montpellier, and Prague. In addition to teaching the liberal arts (such as grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music theory), these universities provided advanced education in the disciplines of law, medicine, and theology. The study of theology necessarily included the study of the Bible, a programmatic intertwinement that extended from Augustine’s foundational works, such as On Christian Doctrine, although naturally one side would dominate at different times (Smalley 76–77).
Indeed, both before and after the emergence of the university, the great Christian teachers described the larger educational program as necessary for understanding Scripture, “The student needs language, grammar and history in order to understand the literal sense, dialectic to distinguish true doctrine from false, arithmetic for number symbolism, natural history for the symbolism of beasts and birds; rhetoric, the crown of the higher education, is necessary not only for his own studies, but to enable him to teach and preach what he has learnt.” (Smalley 26–27)
As Hugh of St. Victor outlined in his programmatic Didascalion, the various other areas of education allowed the student to engage in biblical interpretation at progressively higher levels. The arts and sciences allowed students to begin with the literal historical sense, enabling them to engage in depth the historical books of the Bible in both the OT and NT. Doctrinal/theological teaching, as well as the trained practice of lectio divina, would then aid the passage to allegory, as students could begin with the NT doctrinally driven texts and then move to the OT to correlate the latter with the former. However, Smalley observes that Hugh’s program as he articulated it was too idealistic in the rigor it required, “The programme was both too conservative and too modern. It would have made any kind of academic specialization quite impossible and yet specialization was just what it demanded. Moreover it implied too high a tension between the academic and the religious life. Hugh’s ideal exegete was a combination of Paris master and contemplative religious which only exceptional circumstances could produce.” (105) Hence, two of his successors would end up focusing on one side or the other of this program, Richard on the mystical/spiritual/allegorical, and Andrew on the historical/literal.
The other senses of Scripture beyond the literal also became more popular for education in the preaching context. Whereas many of the works we have, especially from earlier in the medieval era, were designed for reception by clergy in training or fellow monks in a monastery, others would use these senses for educating the laity. Allegory became less of a distinct method for teaching theology in the schools when there was a field for the systematic teaching of theology, but allegory could be used for instructing the laity, “for presenting to them the Church and her sacraments in a concrete and intelligible form. The old Alexandrian conception of allegory as a way of imparting secrets, unfit for the simple, was becoming antiquated.” (Smalley 244) Tropology was especially useful for such purposes, especially in satirizing those who were not fulfilling their offices or ranks, “So the preacher ‘holds a mirror’ to society; he shows people what they are, and what they ought to be; they for their part delight in a spectacle which is both funny and edifying.” (Smalley 245) The anagogical sense was considered less fitting for the pulpit, but it was also not best suited for the classroom. Rather, it fit best in the monastic cloister for articulating religious experience.
It was also in the educational context from which one of the widest-reaching impacts of medieval biblical scholarship came. I am of course talking about the chapter divisions. The verse divisions would come later, but in the medieval era certain teachers began working with systems of chapter divisions. However, these were generally for either private use or for use within the circle of the teacher, his colleagues, and/or his students. One can see in the manuscripts available today several attempts of trial and error to develop chapter divisions. The one in use today is said to have ultimately come from Stephen Langton, who only developed it after around thirty years in the context of his teaching experience. This was a crucial step in making it easier for readers to find biblical references. Indeed, Smalley notes how by the end of the thirteenth century the general approach of referencing and study that resonates to this day had been developed:
By the end of the century one could look up one’s text in a concordance, find a list of variant readings by consulting correctoria, and probably discover what Augustine had said about the points arising from it. Glossaries, dictionaries and other aids to study filled several shelves in any well-stocked library. A few, such as the interpretations of Hebrew names by St. Jerome, would date from the patristic period, but most of them would have been composed quite recently. Given all these aids to study, one was expected to quote one’s references exactly, putting book, chapter and the equivalent of a verse for Scripture; author, title, book, chapter for patristic. The whole library technique, in fact, had approached the modern with surprising suddenness. (366)
Another aspect of the medieval repertoire of education was interaction with European Jews to maintain the knowledge of Hebrew and to discuss the OT. As noted before the Victorines were especially known for their connections with the school of Rashi, a parallel school in Judaism that likewise emphasized the exposition of the literal sense, albeit without neglecting the other senses. This frequent interaction with the Jews meant that the OT of the Latin Vulgate was subject to more extensive correction through consultation with the Hebrew texts of the Jews. Indeed, their impact was such that Hugh of St. Victor followed the Hebrew canonical order and accepted the primacy of the Hebrew text while separating out the apocryphal writings as edifying but not canonical. But his NT also had to be accompanied by a section from “the Fathers.”
Smalley provides several more examples of the impact Jewish interaction had on medieval biblical scholars:
The Benedictine, Sigebert of Gembloux, teaching at Metz about 1070, ‘was very dear to the Jews of the city because he was skillful in distinguishing the Hebrew truth from other editions; and he agreed with what they told him, if it were in accordance with the Hebrew truth’. St. Stephen Harding, abbot of Citeaux, corrected the text of the Old Testament with the help of Jews, whom he consulted in French, as he tells us. His second volume was finished in 1109.The Cistercians continued the work of correction, though sometimes with more zeal than method. Nicholas Manjacoria, the learned monk of Trois Fontaines, was horrified to discover, while visiting a house of his Order, a brother in the scriptorium copying into a good, early text of the Bible all the additions that he could find in other exemplars, convinced that the fullest version must be the most accurate. Nicholas gently expostulated with him and formed a project, which he afterwards carried out, to lay down rules for the right procedure in textual criticism. He had already, when attached to a church in Rome, corrected the text of the Bible, consulting a Jew and learning from him something of the scholarship of Rashi, although Rashi’s influence is still indirect and he does not give the names of his informant or of his sources. (79–80)
As a further example, when Richard and Andrew of St. Victor argued about the interpretation of the prophecy of Isa 7:14, in which Andrew adopted the explanation he received from the Jews as the literal sense of the prophecy, Richard did not object to his consulting with the Jews. Rather, he objected simply to accepting a view that undermined Christian interpretation of the OT. (Smalley 110) The same would apply to Andrew’s acceptance of Jewish interpretation of Isa 53 as referring to the Jewish people or perhaps Isaiah in particular. Andrew’s particular interaction with the Jews indeed went deeper than most, as his fluency with Hebrew was such that he could read rabbinic texts and the rabbinic Hebrew of Jewish commentaries in addition to biblical Hebrew. (Smalley 155) A similar level of engagement can also be seen in the works of Nicholas of Lyra. On the Jewish side of this relationship, one can also see the depth of engagement in the works of Joseph Kara, Rashbam, and Joseph Bekhor Shor.