Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation by Andrew Kraebel (review)

Andrew Kraebel has written a major study examining the treatment of the Bible in fourteenth-century England. This book explores a landscape of biblical commentary and translation that, it cogently argues, was more intellectually fruitful and less divided than has sometimes been thought. In particular, the argument (re)integrates academic commentary and “extramural” writings, including vernacular texts. It also explores how the biblical commentaries produced by Wyclif and by his followers fitted into and emerged from their intellectual context, rather than standing wholly at odds with it. The book is a diptych: the first two chapters examine biblical commentary within the university, and the following two graduate to considerations of commentary beyond the university and, sometimes, the returning influence of such extra-academic materials on scholars.

Chapter 1 begins with the observation that the history of western European biblical interpretation in these centuries has tended to revolve around large, overarching approaches, prescriptions for all of the Bible. Tracking the progress or regress of such totalizing approaches, Kraebel argues, does not capture the more ground-level reality of surviving commentaries on specific books. Seeking such granular evidence, the chapter explores commentaries specific to the Psalter from three thinkers, Henry Cossey, Nicholas Trevet, and Thomas Waleys. The argument observes how the special nature of this intellectually and culturally central biblical book proved a challenge for overarching hermeneutic theories; how Cossey, Trevet, and Waleys registered this challenge; and how their commentaries show these writers themselves weighing up the sometimes discordant priorities of past Psalter-specific expositions against total interpretative theories. In closing the chapter, Kraebel underlines the value, in present-day research, of studying book-specific traditions of biblical commentary diachronically: we need to know the book-specific lineages influencing a commentator to assess that commentator’s response to broader, totalizing interpretative theories (51–52).

Staying within academia but traveling later in the century, the second chapter turns to what survives of Wyclif’s postils on the whole Bible, attending to his postil on the Psalter as a useful test-case, and then comparing that to his work on Matthew. Kraebel finds a previously underappreciated “hermeneutic eclecticism” in the postils (57), which draw, like those of Wyclif’s Oxford predecessors, on a diverse array of book-specific commentaries for both ideas and methods. He also offers a short but important set of new findings about Wyclif’s adoption and adaptation, in work on the Psalter, of the cross-referencing system of the twelfth-century Media glosatura of Gilbert of Poitiers (61–62). This discussion and its supporting evidence in the book’s first appendix (188–91) should interest anyone working on information history. Having characterized Wyclif in his postils as a writer mixing hermeneutics and juggling biblical senses, the argument compares the unfinished postil on Matthew written by Wyclif’s contemporary, William Woodford. Though the two differed in style and on points of substance, both, Kraebel argues, eclectically selected approaches according to the needs of the textual moment; both, he also suggests, wrote in the shadow of Nicholas of Lyra, with commentary traditions as yet unable fully to absorb and accommodate Nicholas’s literalism. Kraebel shows here the dividends to be gathered by exploring the thought of apparent opponents for shared intellectual habits.

Chapter 3 brings us to Richard Rolle. Kraebel presents Rolle’s Latin Psalter as a text rendering academic insights into a format devotionally workable for clerics with limited exposure to scholarly commentary and community. He also proposes that Rolle revised this text (103). The second appendix substantiates this idea through preliminary study of the text’s two versions, across fifteen copies, including all known insular witnesses. The appendix shows that the second version was produced through sensitive revision by someone with access to a good copy of the first version, probably working in Yorkshire; that is, that the second version could very well be Rolle...