Approaching the Bible in Medieval England by Eyal Poleg (review)

In Approaching the Bible in Medieval England, Eyal Poleg discusses the mediation of the Bible in late medieval England: that is, the average layperson’s experience of the Bible not as text, but through multisensory media such as liturgy, music, sermons, images, ceremonial objects, and ritual performance. Approaching the Bible’s ambitious goal is to describe the interaction of the many different ways in which the Bible was known in the Middle Ages; the extent to which this interaction was shaped by the clergy; and the level of control laypeople had over the process. The strength of Poleg’s book is its holistic approach to the complexity of Biblical transmission in medieval society. It synthesizes previously separate areas of scholarship and embeds detailed case studies from late medieval England in a broader historical overview. The methodological principle of médiologie governs Poleg’s historical narrative, drawing on the work of Marxist theorist Régis Debray; médiologie analyses the transmission of cultural meaning and ideology, emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach, with particular attention to the interplay of texts, sensory experiences, and material artefacts. This approach provides Poleg with a theoretical framework that structures his findings but does not overwhelm his material.

Chapter 1, which follows the liturgical celebration of Palm Sunday, pulls the reader into the multisensory experience of the liturgy, emphasizing its spatial elements. The chapter explores how this physical experience differs from but complements textual exegesis of Matthew 21.1–9, the account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Examining evidence from processionals, church murals, chronicles, Psalters, the Constitutions of Lanfranc, and the musical notation of antiphons and versicles, the chapter shows how the liturgical rites used on Palm Sunday constructed a “quasi biblical” language that blurred biblical text and liturgical performance. Chapter 2 brings together evidence from book history, contemporary chronicles, romances, records, and liturgical texts to examine the symbolic role of the book as material object in two important rituals in late medieval English life: oath-taking, and the celebration of the Mass. Poleg points out the similarities between these two rituals and argues for a reconsideration of what was meant by the “textus,” the book on which oath-takers swore in the courtroom, and which the Deacon ceremonially laid on the altar and kissed during Mass. Poleg shows that textus were not service books but part of the liturgical paraphernalia, “judged primarily by their covers” (91) rather than their contents, which might be a miscellany of liturgical texts, or, in the case of Jewish oath-takers, a Jewish sacred text.

Chapter 3 examines a sample of late medieval “pandects,” the new small, portable Bibles which emerged with the rise of the universities in the twelfth century. Poleg’s study of a sample of these Bibles argues for a remarkable amount of uniformity in their paratexts (their rubrics, divisions, illumination, page layout, biblical glossaries and mnemonic aids), suggesting that the pandects were designed for ease of reference for preaching, rather than for the classroom. These reading apparatuses mediated the Bibles’ textual content in dialogue with other forms of Biblical mediation, particularly Biblical exegesis and the liturgy. Chapter 4 examines three late medieval English sermons from compilations made as preachers’ aids. Poleg shows how these sermons reflect the way reading apparatuses such as those described in chapter 3 created a mediated text for preachers constructing sermons: that is, preachers used technologies of mediation, such as the Biblical glossary Interpretation of Hebrew Names, in combination with visual mnemonic tools, rhetorical devices, artes praedicandi, and the structuring framework of the liturgical calendar to create sermons that were “elaborate structures comprised of biblical building blocks” (162). These sermons used truncated and decontextualized biblical quotes not so much to elucidate biblical narrative as to support moral lessons and church doctrine.

Approaching the Bible is a valuable introduction to the practical role of religion in everyday life in late medieval England, of great interest both to religious historians and to scholars of late medieval literature, as its case studies show how religious...