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9 Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages Daniel Sheerin Before the era of inexpensive printing and widespread literacy, the ordinary person’s encounter with Scripture was vicarious and quite selective —for although personal study of Scripture by cultural and religious elites was encouraged,1 the principal encounter with Scripture was in a liturgical context, where selected excerpts were chanted or read to/for them within a contextualizing ritual. This was true of Jews as well as Christians but it was especially the case with the latter. Ordinary people partook of a vicarious biblical literacy, one made possible by a clergy trained to chant the Scripture interpretatively and explain it to them, and by the congregations’ own complex of liturgico-biblical interpretative skills.2 However, although a variety of biblical texts were read or chanted to the people in liturgical settings, the biblical texts of the eucharistic liturgy (the Mass, Divine Liturgy) could include only a small fraction of the extensive collection (bibliotheca) of sacred books (biblia) that the appropriation of the Septuagint Bible and canonization of what came to be called the New Testament had created for Christians of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.3 Earlier evidence suggests that selection of biblical texts for liturgical reading was in part ad libitum, in part determined by tradition, and, to a limited extent, dictated by programs of continuous reading of particular books (lectio continua) or reading of discontinuous excerpts from particular books in their biblical sequence (lectio occurrens). But I wish to direct our focus to a later stage, the beginning of the ninth century, by which time, as a result of the process James McKinnon called ‘‘properization,’’4 the majority of days of the liturgical year had a full set of propers (propria ), that is, chants, readings, and prayers peculiar or ‘‘proper’’ to that day. 162 Sheerin The project of this essay is to show how techniques borrowed from traditional biblical exegesis were employed to solve the problem of finding coherent meaning in these ensembles of biblical excerpts and nonbiblical prayers.5 Why is this interesting and what has it to do with biblical interpretation ? The perforce selective transmission and dissemination of Scripture through the chants and readings of the Mass entailed a virtual rewriting of Scripture. The component texts that made up the mass were altered by being given a special prominence, by being decontextualized and by being recontextualized amid other excerpts. This mélange of excerpts amounted to new parabiblical entity,6 an anthology of biblical passages that were individually and collectively applied to a particular season or feast and presented repeatedly, and so, memorably, to the worshipping community in the annual cycles of the liturgical year. These sets of biblical passages constituted an annually performed epitome of Scripture, a ‘‘liturgical Bible.’’ This ‘‘liturgical Bible’’ required its own exegesis, and this was provided, earlier, in isolation, by homilies that explained and harmonized the propers of individual feasts, and eventually en bloc, in liturgical commentaries that discussed the propers of feasts through the entire liturgical year. The corpus of liturgical exegesis was produced mainly by borrowing from and adapting the methods of traditional biblical exegesis. Of course, the exegesis that elucidated the excerpted texts when in situ could be similarly excerpted and applied to the passages in their new settings. But of greater interest is the adaptation of traditional principles , techniques, and tools of biblical interpretation to explain the excerpted passages in their new venue and combination, namely, their attachment to a particular feast and their harmony with one another and with the prayer texts proper to the day. This little-studied enterprise in parabiblical exegesis deserves attention both because it was a creatively adaptive enterprise and because it was a part of the training of both secular clergy and religious in the Latin West from the ninth century through the twentieth, and thus a significant part of biblical paideia in its broadest sense. This essay’s scope ends with the twelfth century, the intermediate stage of this liturgical-exegetical activity, but the exegesis of liturgical texts continued to generate its own literature, both learned and devotional, through the later Middle Ages and the Reformation, and on into the modern era, and the lectionary reforms of recent decades have themselves evoked a corpus of publications in this same vein. I am going to consider: (1) Why the coherence of the mass propers constituted a problem; (2) Why the problem had to...

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