Producing Christian Culture
Medieval Exegesis and Its Interpretative Genres

Producing Christian Culture takes as its thread the 'interpretative genres' within which medieval people engaged with the Bible. Contributors to the volume present specific material as a case study illustrative of a specific genre, whether devotional, homiletical, scholarly, or controversial. The chronological range moves from St Augustine to the use of gospel texts in polemical writing of the first two decades of the 1500s, with focal sections on early medieval Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian theology, the scholastic turn of the High Middle Ages, and the influence of vernacular writing in the later Middle Ages. The tremendous range and vitality of medieval responses to biblical texts are highlighted within the studies.

Introduction

PART I

Inheritances

1 Augustine, rape, and the hermeneutics of love

MELANIE WEBB

PART II

Learning and teaching through Scripture

2 Lindisfarne and the gospels: the art of interpretation

FRANCIS WATSON

3 Scholarly practices: the Eusebian canon tables in the Hiberno-Latin tradition

MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD

4 Historia and littera in Carolingian commentaries on St Matthew: elements for an inventory of exegetical vocabulary in the medieval Latin Church

ELISABETH MÉGIER

PART III

The changing roles of Scripture

5 Scripture and the changing culture of theology in the High Middle Ages

GILES E. M. GASPER

6 Secretum internae uisionis: the introspective reader and the pilgrim soul in William’s Commentary

SIGBJØRN SØNNESYN

7 Conceiving the Word: the Virgin Mary and the Gospel of Luke in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias

GEMMA WAIN

PART IV

Scripture and the world

8 Manifest, as in the gospels: some approaches to literal exposition of the psalms

THERESA GROSS-DIAZ

9 The gospels and the papacy in the Late Middle Ages

IAN CHRISTOPHER LEVY

Index

Giles E. M. Gasper is Reader in Medieval History in the Department of History, Durham University, and specialises in the history of medieval thought. He has written widely on Anselm of Canterbury, on the notion of spiritual and material economies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and on the history of medieval science, in particular the scientific works of Robert Grosseteste. Educated at the University of Oxford and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Gasper has held Visiting Positions at the Universities of Oslo and Oxford.

Francis Watson has held a Research Chair in Biblical Interpretation at Durham University since 2007. He was previously Kirby Laing Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen (1998–2007) and Lecturer and then Reader in New Testament at King’s College London (1984–98). He is currently Editor of New Testament Studies and is Principal Investigator on the "Fourfold Gospel and its Rivals" project (2012–17), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The themes of textual reception and identity construction lie at the heart of his recent published work: Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (2004, 2nd ed. 2015), Gospel Writing (2013), and The Fourfold Gospel (2016).

Matthew R. Crawford is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. After completing his doctorate at Durham University, from 2012 until 2015 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Durham on the AHRC-funded project, "The Fourfold Gospel and its Rivals." In addition to his monograph Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture (2014), he has published a variety of articles on late antique Christianity and on the reception of gospel literature, and is currently working on a monograph on the Eusebian Canon Tables.