The Bible in the fifteenth century

CHRISTOPHER OCKER

The medieval Bible was hardly a book at all, but a collection of ancient writings in translation. Even when unadorned by glosses or other commentary, which was rare, the Bible's sixty-six books and eight apocryphal writings were still difficult to separate from layers of interpretation. The translations of Jerome and others made the first layer (several books of the Vulgate were taken from the Latin version that predated Jerome; and the Vulgate's Psalms were in Jerome's second translation, from the Greek Septuagint, not the original Hebrew). Prologues made a second layer. The Old Testament prologues were taken from various of Jerome's writings. The New Testament prologues came from diverse sources but circulated under the saint's name. This rare, less adorned Vulgate was the form taken by early printed Bibles: text with prologues, often traditional but, as in the case of the German and Czech translations, sometimes new.935 936 Usually the Bible was read in parts with commentary or in the form of semi-biblical narratives. It was less a book than a body of ancient literature at the core of past and present attempts to repeat, adapt, fathom and replicate its discourse, the 'base text' of 'highly imaginative commentaries, moralisations, and figures used to illumine the biblical signiricances.

It was also a controlled literature. Henry of Langenstein, while professor of theology at Vienna in the 1380s, lectured on Jerome's prologue to the Bible, before turning to the Pentateuch prologue and the book of Genesis. He made a fascinating observation. The meaning of biblical language involved both authorial and reading intentions. The souls of both writers and readers came to their tasks with certain interests and moral powers. This implied a textual

Community stretching over time and a mingling of wills subject to the agency of the Holy Spirit, who was responsible for inspiration at both ends of biblical literacy, the textual source and the human target. It was the Bible's state of continued animation that prevented its sense from being turned this way or that, thought Langenstein, manipulated like a stage prop, 'scripture does not have a wax nose but an iron and fiery nose!', he said in an uncomfortable metaphor.937 A century later, Johannes Staupitz, Augustinian friar, mentor and friend ofMartin Luther, noted that the language ofGod can be heard by those in whom the Spirit indwells.938 Inspiration referred not to the mechanical production of words, but to the condition of holy writers and readers and their agreements with one another. Revelation had never ceased, as theologians learned from the fourteenth-century Franciscan William of Ockham, who enumerated the sources of Catholic truth: Scripture, apostolic oral tradition, custom, conclusions drawn from the first three, and new revelations. Late medieval theologians, whatever they thought of Ockham and the censures of the mid-fourteenth century, largely agreed on this.939 The entire inspired series, fTom ancient record to the conclusion of a syllogism, occurred under or alongside or with (a debatable theological point) God's agency, the measure, check or control of the myriad possible thoughts and conclusions that might be associated with a portion of biblical writing. Even sceptics of prophecy believed in revelation, for example, the fifteenth-century chancellor of the University of Paris Jean Gerson, who listed personal inspiration with two other first-order sources of truth: Scripture and tradition.940 Scholars provided scientific explanations of or corrections to an animist's view of the book, alive at its production, preservation and use, not by denying a supernatural view of it, but by rationalising and limiting it. In addition, the traditions of interpretation that prevailed in the church were held to be a matter of principle consistent with biblical teachings; continuity could be presupposed, as the extremely influential Franciscan theologian of the turn of the thirteenth to fourteenth century, John Duns Scotus, suggested.941 The presumption of continuity has been observed in scholars as diverse as Marsilius of Inghen, Heinrich Totting of Oyta and John Wyclif in the late fourteenth century, and Jan Hus, Jean Gerson, Agostino Favaroni, Denys van Leeuwen and Wendelin Steinbach in the fifteenth.942 At some point, everyone bowed to convention, even the English dissenters accused of LoUardy, in their way (more on this below), when they argued over the content and definition of conventional belief. The consensus was documented and subjected to dialectical experiments conducted by a professional class of educated men, and one could say that scholastic commentary and theology, in both Latin and vernacular adaptations, became the primary intellectual context of fifteenth-century biblical literacy.

The medieval genres of scholastic commentary and methods of interpretation completed their development before 1350.943 The most important fifteenth-century innovation in biblical scholarship was Lorenzo Valla's philological commentary on the Greek New Testament (c. 1448), which did not become influential until its discovery and publication by Erasmus (1505).944 Yet Valla's philology was anticipated by grammatical and rhetorical interpretation in twelfth-century monastic schools and in the early universities, although it was exercised there with limited knowledge of Hebrew, scarcely any Greek, and textual criticism, such as it was, restricted to the Vulgate without the Greek and Hebrew originals.11

We still know relatively little about late medieval Bible scholars, with the exception of John Wyclif, whose legacy was acknowledged among English dissenters in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding him. There has been far more interest in vernacular than in Latin religious writing, although many have pointed to the links between the two cultures.12 Few detailed and sustained studies of fifteenth-century scholastic commentaries have appeared since 1959, when Wilfrid Werbeck published his study of the interpretation of the Psalms by an Aragonese Augustinian friar named Jamie Perez of Valencia.13 The concluding part of Henri de Lubac's Exegese medievale: les quatre sens de I’Ecriture, which was published in 1964, may have discouraged attention to this period when it characterised late medieval commentaries as 'decadent'.14 Max Engammare included a survey of interpretations in his examination of the Song

11  Dahan, L’exegese chretienne, 213-62. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim, and Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55-98. Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i996).

12  Gustav Adolf Benrath, Wyclifs Bibelkommentar (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, i966), remains a useful study of the commentaries. See also Beryl Smalley, 'The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif s Dilemma’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), 73-89, reprinted in Beryl Smalley, Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 289ff., and G. R. Evans, 'Wyclif s Logic and Wyclif s Exegesis: The Context’, in Diana Wood and Katherine Walsh, eds., The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley (Oxford: Blackwell, i985), 286-300. For changing perspectives on the Lollards, a good beginning is Fiona Somerset, 'Introduction', in Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens and Derrick G. Pitard, eds., Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 9-16, and the essays of the entire volume. Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 147-216, esp. 173, 201, 207-8, explores tacit hermeneutical agreements between Wycliffites and their opponents, related to tensions within scholasticism.

13  Wilfrid Werbeck, Jacobus Perez von Valencia: Untersuchungen zu seinem Psalmenkommentar (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1959).

14  Henri de Lubac, Exegese medievale: Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture, 2 vols., with 2 parts each (Paris: Aubier, 1959-64), vol. 2.2,369-91. Only volume i has been translated into English, Mark Sebanc, trans., Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998). See the comments of Alastair Minnis and Robert Lerner, in Alastair Minnis, 'Fifteenth-Century Versions of Thomistic Literalism’, in R. E. Lerner, ed., Neue Richtungen in der hoch - und spdtmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 178-79, and Lerner, 'Afterword', ibid., 181-8.

Of Songs in the Renaissance.945 Salvatore I. Camporeale examined the relation of Valla's biblical work to his controversies.946 Helmut Feld edited and studied the commentaries of the late fifteenth-century Tubingen professor Wendelin Steinbach.947 There are a few brief studies of individuals. Jean Gerson, the outspoken chancellor of the University of Paris, produced several brief pieces on biblical interpretation, about which Karlfried Froehlich wrote an important article, but no one has as yet investigated Gerson's only complete Bible commentaries, one on the penitential Psalms and another on the Song of Songs.948 Denys van Leeuwen, living in the Carthusian Charterhouse of Roermond, wrote forty-three Bible commentaries between 1434 and 1457.949 Denys Turner treated his interpretation of the Song of Songs, but no one has yet devoted an entire monograph to any of the commentaries, or to much else of this Carthusian's 184 authentic writings.950 Recent essays treat the literal exegesis of the Italian Dominican Giorgio of Siena, the literal exegesis of the Spanish secular priest Alfonso de Madrigal at mid-century and the Florentine Dominican Girolamo Savonarola near its close, and the somewhat nostalgic view of the Bible's fourfold meaning advocated by the Benedictine Johannes Trithemius.951 A recent article uncovers the changing relation of allegorical reading to prophecy in Savonarola's sermons during the first months of the populist regime in Florence (1494).22 One of the most influential commentaries was Nicholas ofLyra's Postilla litteralis on the entire Bible. Its reception has been studied only for Spain.23 A Jewish convert who rose to the office of bishop, Pablo of Burgos, annotated Lyra early in the second quarter of the century in order to compensate, he said, for problems with Lyra's understanding of the original Hebrew and its Christian meaning. Burgos added his own prologue after Lyra's.24 At mid-century, a Franciscan famous for his opposition to the expansion of observant reform in Germany, Matthias Coring, wrote corrections of Burgos in defence of Lyra. The early editions of Lyra (the first was printed by Weynheym and Pannartz at Rome in 1471-2) always included all three texts - Lyra's Postilla literalis, Burgos' annotations and Doring's review - along with Lyra's Postilla moralis, Guilelmus Brito's exposition of the biblical prologues and short treatises by Lyra against Judaism.25 The editions thus record a complex dialogue of views and arguments, which has only been studied in tiny bits and pieces.26 Although the visual representation of biblical themes plays a weU-known role in the production of visionary states, whatever links may have existed between visionary writings, images and devotion and scholastic methods of reading and interpretation have yet to be explored.27

Of Thomistic Literalism', 163-80. Karlfried Froehlich, 'Johannes Trithemius on the Fourfold Sense of Scripture', in Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson, eds., Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 23-60, for the Benedictine Johannes Trithemius' somewhat nostalgic advocacy of the fourfold meaning.

22  Michael O'Connor, 'The Ark and the Temple in Savonarola's Teaching (Winter 1494)', in Richard Griffiths, eds., The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 9-27.

23  Klaus Reinhardt, 'Das Werk des Nicolaus von Lyra im mittelalterlichen Spanien', Traditio 48 (1987), 321-58. But see also Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 179-83.

24  Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla litteralis super bibliam cum adnotationibus et replicis (Strasbourg: Anton Koberger, 1497), ff. i6rb-20vb for Burgos' prologue, which may strike the reader as less diametrically opposed to Lyra than Doring would suggest.

25 Karlfried Froehlich, 'The Printed Gloss', Biblia Latina cum glossa ordinaria, 4 vols., introduced by Margareth Gibson and Karlfried Froehlich (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992; repr. of Strasbourg: Adolph Rusch, 1480/1), vol. i, xii-xxvi, here xvi. The editor of the Venice edition of 1495, Bernardinus Gadolus, combined the Ordinary Gloss with Lyra-Burgos-Doring, and added a small treatise at the beginning on the books ofthe Bible and their translators, which was subsequently included in most editions of the Ordinary Gloss (PL 113, cols. 19-24). Ibid., xvii.

26  James Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). Reinhardt, 'Das Werk des Nicolaus von Lyra' (note 2i and very important). Scott H. Hendrix, Ecclesia in via: Ecclesiological Developments in the Medieval Psalms of Martin Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 59-68, 80-2. Kenneth Hagen, A Theology of Testament in the Young Luther: The Lectures on Hebrew (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 16-17, 26-7, 50, 54, 75, 85, 96-7.

27  It is impossible to map here the poles of current debate in religious iconography and devotion, but these works may suggest them: Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books,

This is the tip of a great iceberg. To recognise this, we must ignore Gerhard Groote (1340-84), the founder of the Modern Devotion, probably the most influential organised movement of piety in northern Europe. He once famously complained that scholastic speculation undermined the study of Scripture, and theologians seem to have often made similar charges.28 Were this true, our labour could be brief. But the Bible continued to be studied in the schools. Bachelors and masters of theology were still required to lecture on it well into the sixteenth century, as they were also required to lecture on Peter Lombard's Sentences and to perform disputations.29 In at least some places, like the University of Oxford, Bible study even increased. Earlier commentaries, like the Historia scholastica by Peter Comestor and the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra, continued their popularity among students and teachers, and a number of Oxford commentaries produced in the fifteenth century survive.30 Cambridge also continued to require Bible lectures, as did Paris and, given the influence of Paris' theology curriculum, probably every theology faculty in Europe's proliferating universities.31 In central Europe, masters also gave biblical lectures until finally, at the end of the fifteenth century, professors of Bible were appointed alongside professors of theology

1998); James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979); James Marrow, 'Art and Experience in Dutch Manuscript Illumination around 1400: Transcending the Boundaries', The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996), 101-17; Kurt Barstow, The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Ferrara (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 117-202; and Reindert Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994).

28  Gerardi Magni Epistolae, ed. WiHelm Mulder (Tekstuitgaven van Ons Geestelijk Erf, 3; Antwerp: Uitgever Neerlandia, 1933), 23-36. R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Leiden: BriH, 1968), 81-2. Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 115-21. Compare William J. Courtenay, 'The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations', Church History 54 (1985), 182. Jacques Verger, 'L'exegese de l'Universite', in Pierre Riche and Guy Lobrichon, eds., Le Moyen Age et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 225-6. Beryl Smalley, 'Problems of Exegesis in the Fourteenth Century', in Paul Wilpert, ed., Antike und Orient im Mittelalter (Miscellanea MediaevaHia 1; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962), 266-74.

29  Jacques Verger, 'Patterns', and Monika Asztalos, 'The Faculty of Theology', in H. De Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35-74, 409-41.

30  J. I. Catto and R. Evans, eds. The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 29-30, 196-8, 257, 267-8, 271, 279, 473. For the late medieval uses of Lyra, consider Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 179-83, and Klepper, 'Literal versus Carnal', passim.

31  Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 173-4, 185-8.

(for example, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther).952 Some of the works neglected by historians are massive. The Dominican Jacob of Soest lectured on parts of Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Gospel according to Matthew at Cologne, leaving a manuscript of 639 pages.953 The lectures are identified as the work of his baccalaureate, which seems hardly likely given their extraordinary length. They may be a later revision of the bachelor's lectures made at a Dominican school. Dietrich Kerkering, a secular priest and theologian at Cologne, who represented the university at the Council of Constance, lectured on the Bible.954 Johannes of Dorsten, who, like several other prominent Augustinians of the fifteenth century, entered the order after attaining the degree of master of arts in a university (others include Johannes of Paltz, Johannes Nathin and Johannes Staupitz), lectured extensively on the Bible as regent master of the Augustinian school at Erfurt (his marginal notes have not been studied).955

Fifteenth-century theologians believed, like their predecessors, that the Bible was a coherent body of literature. It was arranged, they explained in various ways, according to a theological structure.956 That structure represented the historical record of interactions between God and people, which progressed from promise and anticipation to fulfilment, from the Old Testament to the New.957 The traditional division of each Testament into three parts appears in fifteenth-century commentaries (law, prophets, hagiography; Gospels, apostles and fathers; e. g. Denys van Leeuwen). Scholars would have known how to use the contrast of Testaments to structure a book, as the fourteenth-century Carmelite John Baconthorpe and the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra did for the Gospel according to Matthew. They would have known of Pierre Aureol, a Franciscan master at Paris in the early fourteenth century and author of a compendium of the Bible that rivaled Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica in scope and brevity. He distinguished eight parts by literary styles, by 'the eight methods of teaching that it assumes'. The Bible's purpose, defined as its 'final cause', was human salvation, a state of perfect humanity.958 A stylistic paradox both betrayed and accomplished that purpose, according to Jerome's letter to the priest Paulinus, which served as a general prologue to most Bibles: biblical language was coarse and offensive, except to those with spiritual insight. For them, it was a sublime record of divine humility and conversation.959 It belonged to a 'pragmatic literacy' documented and nurtured by the continuing history of interpretation.960 In short, the Bible was a text entangled with subsequent Christian tradition and its subjective effects, an 'evolving text', as Gilbert Dahan has called it, and as such, it was studied in universities, increasingly preached and read in Europe's vernacular languages, repeated in church rites and private prayers, and displayed pictorially in devotional books and images, paintings and sculpture.961

It is relatively easy to trace biblical literacy from the privileged circles of learned priests and monks to less exclusive places. We may simply follow the books. The media of biblical knowledge multiplied in the late Middle Ages, while clergy extended efforts at religious conversion that had begun with the monastic reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which efforts reached well beyond monasteries in the next 200 years.962 Perhaps the most important sign of the proliferation of biblical media was the production of vernacular translations of the Bible. They multiplied throughout Europe from the thirteenth century in various dialects of French, German, Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Czech and Polish, and they included a variety of semi-biblical genres that reflect uses of the Bible in liturgy, prayer and study: verse Gospels, passionals or other adaptations of Tatian's Diatessaron; evangelaries and other lectionary collections; verse and prose Psalters, some with Peter Lombard's glosses from the Glossa ordinaria or other commentary; Song of

Songs; Apocalypses; and historical books or select narratives from the Old Testament.43 A partial Bible was prepared for Louis IX, king of France, in the middle of the thirteenth century, and another appeared in Spanish about the same time. A complete French translation was completed in 1280. In the fourteenth century, complete Bibles were first translated into German (1350), Czech (c. 1357-60), Dutch (1360), and English (c. 1390), while French Bibles were recopied and re-translated and fragmentary translations in Italian were gathered into more complete versions. A Valencian translation of the entire Bible was completed in 1417.

The two most enduring commentaries to emerge from early scholasticism were the Glossa ordinaria and Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica. The Glossa was a standard commentary on the entire bible that circulated to all the schools of Europe from a centre of production at Paris in the thirteenth century.44 It provided interpretations drawn from patristic literature. Although reproduction of the Latin Glossa dropped in the second half of the thirteenth century, the fact that parts of it were included in some of the

43  This and the following are based on these works. Jean Bonnard, Les traduction de la Bible en vers frangais au Moyen Age (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967) for verse translations. G. W. H. Lampe, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 362-87, 415-52, 462-91. Bettye Thomas Chambers, Bibliography of French Bibles: Fifteenth - and Sixteenth-Century French-Language Editions of the Scriptures (Geneva: Droz, 1983), 1-34. Amin Doumit, Deutscher Bibeldruck von 1466-1522 (St Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae, 1997), 10-11. Wilhelm Walther, Die deutsche Bibelubersetzung des Mittelalters (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1966), cols. 741-5. J. A. A. M. Biemans, Middelnederlandse Bijbelhandschriften (Leiden: Brill, 1984), passim. G. C. Zieleman, Middelnederlandse epistel - en evangeliepreken (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 57-9. Mikel M. Kors, 'Die Bibel fur Laien: Neuansatz oder Sackgasse? Der Bibelubersetzer von 1360 und Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen', in Nikolaus Staubach, ed., Kirchenreform von unten: Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Bruder vom gemeinsamen Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 243-63, here 244-8. Vladimir Kyas, 'Die alttschechische Bibelubersetzung des 14. Jahrhunderts und ihre Entwicklung im 15. Jahrhundert', in Martin of Tisov, Kutnahorskd Bible/Kuttenberger Bibel, ed. Reinhold Olesch and Hans Rothe, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1989), vol. 2, 9-32. Die alttschechische Dresdener Bible/Drdzd’anskd anebo Leskoveckd bible, ed. Hans Rothe and Friedrich Scholz (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1993). Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 131-55. James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Ralph Hanna, 'English Biblical Text before Lollardy', in Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens and Derrick G. Pitard, eds., Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 141-53.

44  Christopher De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984). Guy Lobrichon, 'Une nouveaute: les gloses de la Bible', in Riche and Lobrichon, eds., Le Moyen Age et la Bible, 99-110. Beryl SmaUey, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: BlackweU, 1942,1952), 46-52. Mark A. Zier, 'The Manuscript Tradition of the glossa ordinaria for Daniel and Hints at a Method for a Critical Edition', Scriptorium 47 (1993), 3-25, esp. 3-5 remains an excellent summary of scholarship.

Translations I have just noted points to its continued usefulness.963 The Historia scholastica was a biblical manual whose mixture of narrative and exegesis served to coordinate diverse sources from within the Bible and between the Bible and profane history.964 It was expanded and translated into French (1280), Catalan (1287) and Dutch (1361) and adapted piecemeal from the thirteenth century in most if not all European languages.965 Most of these texts survive from monastic libraries. Those that were commissioned or owned by laity were usually aristocratic or royal possessions.966 One should also consider adaptations, manuals and semi-biblical works in the vernacular, as James Morey has recently emphasised on the example of England. These include the original Bible moralisee prepared in Latin for King Louis VIII of France between 1220 and 1226 (a compilation of paraphrases, commentaries and interpretive images that served as the prototype of later vernacular versions), John of Caulibus' Meditations on the Life of Christ, which circulated widely under the name of St Bonaventure, the Carthusian Ludolf of Saxony's Life of Christ, the Augustinian Hermit Simon Fidati da Cascia's Works of the Lord Savior, selections and adaptations from the Legenda Aurea, a glossed Diatessaron in Italian from the late thirteenth century, a Dutch sermon collection with the Ordinary Gloss written before 1370, and Latin-Czech Bible dictionaries based on the Mammotrectus, a dictionary composed by the early fourteenth-century Franciscan Giovanni Marchesini (the Latin was published some twenty times before 1500).967 The first complete Czech and English Bibles were also provided with new prologues.

All of this production - scholastic commentaries, the growing number of translations, and the variety of biblical texts and adaptations - is evidence of a thriving clerical culture that increasingly drew laity in its wake. But we should not overestimate the number and diversity of its beneficiaries. Many of these books were produced for the wealthiest people in Europe.968 While others clearly point to a broadening readership, they could only be named 'popular' in some restricted sense. The character ofthe broadest readership is suggested by the famous late medieval block book, the Biblia pauperum, which also exists in over eighty manuscripts. It was probably written in Germany before 1300, and it circulated widely throughout central Europe. Christopher De Hamel has recently called it 'one of the most intellectually sophisticated of medieval biblical commentaries', a work clearly not written for amateurs.969 As was also the case with the early printed copies of the Vulgate and Bible translations, most of its owners appear to have been monasteries, and many copies exist only in fragment.970 It was designed for the trained eye, with forty pictures arranged two to the page, each consisting of two captioned scenes from the Old Testament divided vertically by scenes from the life of Christ and Mary and flanked by four small figures from the Old Testament and quotations from the Psalms or other texts. The book was obviously meant to represent the balanced parallels of the two Testaments, linked by spiritual themes. Other books followed a similar design. The Genealogy of the Life of Christ by Peter of Poitiers (1167-1205) circulated in manuscript and woodcut editions. It presented a pictorial life of Christ and the Blessed Virgin coordinated with Old Testament prophecies. The Speculum humanae salvationis (c. 1310-24) was divided into forty pictures, like the Biblia pauperum, each usually composed with four illustrations (some 394 manuscripts of the Speculum survive971 972). Books of hours, adaptations of the divine office, the monastic cycle of daily prayer, and in particular the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, a prayer office in honour of Mary, used psalms and passages from Job, the Song of Songs, and other Old Testament books, accompanied by images, some of which were identical to those of the Biblia pauperum.54 In addition to these works, which documented the past fulfilment of prophecy, Apocalypse block books advertised future prophecies. They were probably first printed in the Netherlands in the middle of the century. The majority of them circulated in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. They included pictorial representations of its prophecies. Song of Songs block books suggested allegorical interpretations.973 Finally, a text known as the Historia David illustrated the ancient king's life according to the books of Kings.

Although some of these works, most obviously the Books of Hours, adapted a clerical text to a non-clerical audience, they were not designed for mass circulation, like indulgenced wood-block images of the Blessed Virgin or the arma Christi. They represent less a free lay religiosity than devotion tutored by clergy. Much of the increased circulation was in Latin.974 Ecclesiastical prohibitions discouraged biblical literacy outside clergy control. To the old prohibitions of Waldensian translations came a new prohibition inspired by fear of Wycliffites and 'Lollards' and Hussites at the Council of Basel (1431-48).975 Perhaps because of the upheaval around Wyclif and his followers, the dangers of the Hussite revolution, the coming of the printing press, and the origins of Protestantism, one tends to look to England and Germany for late medieval opposition to Bible translations, where translation and literal reading had been clearly politicised.976 The 1407 prohibition of Bible translation and reading of Scripture in English stood among other prohibitions intended to hinder Wycliffite ideas and controversy, reflecting an association of heresy and vernacular reading that only grew at the end of the fourteenth century in England.977 In the Holy Roman Empire, Johannes Schele, the secretary of the emperor Sigismund, and the bishop of Lubeck in 1433 prohibited translations from the Gospels, the Psalter or sacred Scripture overall, from which, they said, heresy and confusion among the clergy arise.978 In 1486, the bishop elect of Mainz, Bertold von Henneberg, issued an edict against Bible translations from Greek and Latin, on the grounds that some language in holy texts cannot be translated into German and cannot be comprehended by the uneducated. A year later, Pope Innocent VIII ordered all bishops to control the publication of religious literature.979 None of this amounted to overwhelming opposition. It is nothing like the politics of translation in the sixteenth century. The church's position with regard to translation was 'one of toleration in principle, and distrust in practice'.980

Apart from Wycliffites, no one seems to have advocated unrestricted Bible reading, and the vernacular production of theology may have declined overall in the fifteenth century.981 The anonymous translator of the Dutch Historia scholastica, the Historiebijbel of 1361, dismissed the idea of a clerical monopoly on religious literacy, yet his patron, Jan Taye, a Brussels patrician, had to coax him repeatedly to tackle the Wisdom books, whose perils for lay readers the translator tried to navigate with a prologue that coaches one never to take these books too literally.982 983 Apart from Wycliffites, the most famous late medieval advocates of lay reading were promoters of the Devotio moderna, who have been both praised as the forerunners of the Lutheran principle of scriptural primacy or biblical humanism and maligned as narrow-minded antiintellectuals. The Devotio moderna repeated the reservations found in the prologue to the Dutch Historiebijbel.65 Gerhard Zerbolt of Zutphen defended lay study in his On Books in German (De libris teutonicalibus, 1393/4). But he advocated restricted lay reading: of the Bible, the laity may only read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles without danger. The historical books of the Old Testament are especially perilous, because they present norms and customs that must not be imitated.984 This was a traditional clerical reservation over the competence of the laity in matters theological.985 But the real goal was reading for virtue, as we will see. It has been suggested that Zerbolt's caution responded to accusations of heresy brought against the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life at the end of the fourteenth century.986 Fifteenth-century trends could only reinforce the cultural boundaries suggested by restricted spiritual reading: over the course of the century the Brethren and Sisters did not form the bud of a lay movement that flowered in the Reformation. Rather, they increasingly emphasised the internal life of their houses, and the character of their movement became increasingly monastic.987

Lay reading was, potentially, both good and bad. The fifteenth-century church knew no total censure of Bible translation. How many would agree with the German Augustinian friar, Gottschalk Hollen, who a generation after Zerbolt observed that vernacular Bible reading was as good for Germans as it was in ancient times for Greeks, Hebrews, Chaldeans, Goths, Slavs and Russians? The real danger was philosophical literature, which inspired one to glory in sophistic cleverness.988 Many, probably, would agree, but that is not quite the same as a rush on religious books.

Biblical knowledge belonged to the society of the clergy, and it therefore implied the church's forms of government, with the sacramental economy that routinely distributed the Holy Spirit to people, and it depended on the church's cultural vanguard, who were not the same vanguard modern scholars have often admired. In the fifteenth century, the church's vanguard were not really the humanists. Nor did they belong to the Modern Devotion, often mistaken for such, which advocated controlled reading. There is little to suggest that the kind of animated text, with its time-defying presupposition of ecclesiastical consensus and the affinity of sincere minds across the centuries, was undermined anywhere by anyone, perhaps least of all by the bibli-cism of late medieval heretics, even though the orthodox worried that bad literal readings lurked behind crises of authority.989 The vanguard may rather have appeared to be people like Jean Gerson, disgusted with heresy, preoccupied with moral order, and insisting on the continuity of reading with tradition.990

Let us consider the accused. Waldensianism was a movement begun around an interpretation of the gospel and vernacular Bible reading in the late twelfth century. But in spite of periodic inquisitorial prosecutions of heretics accused of hybrid Waldensian teachings, only five writings from the entire period between 1230 and 1520 claim to be original Waldensian works, none of them biblical.991 They were all written about 1368. If they are authentic, as scholars tend to believe, they nevertheless give us no reason to think that Waldensianism contributed to popular biblical literacy, although it is clear that theologians and inquisitors associated biblicism with the heresy.992 When people claimed to produce books as Waldensians again, in the 1520s, the literature comprised lowbrow Catholic devotion, religious poetry and fragments of Bible translations, with some Hussite and Protestant material alongside it.993 Apart from the Hussite and Protestant bits, it was identical with what one observes among orthodox writers. In England, the response to Wyclif raised a prolonged debate over the status of vernacular theology, whether or not Wycliffites helped erode the clerical privilege associated with theological Bible reading.994 The opponents of Wycliffites believed that the use of vernacular Scriptures led to heresy and rebellion. It is still difficult to assess the extent and nature of the dissenting movement, insofar as 'Lollard' books portray a religion less dramatically singular, and they made clerical culture and its tools of biblical study more broadly accessible; they did not merely dismiss received methods and tools.995 Wycliffite glosses argued points of doctrine, but also followed school practice, citing the Ordinary Gloss, Nicholas of Lyra and orthodox theologians.996 Their identification of the pope as Antichrist and their allegation of the corruption of friars and the clergy were also known in Latin literature, at least some of it orthodox; the allegations against friars were widely shared. Although Wycliffite biblicism did emphasise vernacular reading, their biblical glosses and their sermons included traditional content, for example, the interpretation of passages according to the fourfold sense.997

This was a conservative century for the church, marked by reactions to Hussites and Wycliffites and by attempts to restore papal monarchy and adapt to the encroaching impossibility of papal temporal influence outside Italy. Biblical literacy was supposed to characterise the culture of an effective clergy, beginning at the top. According to Mattheus of Cracow's jeremiad against the papal schism, On the Filth of the Papal Court (De squaloribus curie, 1403), papal lordship over clergy was restricted by the gospel, the entire canon ofScripture, and the councils of the church.998 Mattheus had been confessor to the electoral Prince Palatine Ruprecht III and his counsel for some years when Ruprecht was elected German king in 1400. What was true for the first bishop of Christendom in Rome was true for all other prelates everywhere. Pierre d'Ailly (1350/1-1420), the famous French conciliarist, insisted at the Council of Constance (1414-18) that high prelates cultivate spiritual, abbot-like habits. They should be elderly, discrete, spiritually minded men who care more about the church than their own lordly affairs, and 'people who study the divine scriptures and don't totally cling to the practical and legal sciences', a study intrinsic to virtue: they should be an example to the faithful. Their stoic demeanour should include modest dress and temperate eating while giving ear to Bible lessons during meals.999 The point was not reading/hearing but the acquisition of character, a virtue-oriented version of St Augustine's view of scriptural learning as an instrument of the enjoyment of God, never an end in itself.1000 Nicholas of Cusa's advice to Pope Pius II, in his Reformacio generalis of 1458/ 9, was this: those who rise to the place of the apostles (that is, bishops) must be conformed to Christ (Christiformes) in order to shape others like Christ. All divinely inspired Scripture reveals desire, the desire for Christ, who is the form of virtues, immortal life and eternal happiness.1001

Cusa adapts a scholastic commonplace, that Scripture reading produces a soul, a self of certain moral powers.1002 The Devotio moderna promoted this methodically, making sacred reading - with book manufacture - a central practice, just as it had been advocated as a spiritual discipline by Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St Victor, WiUiam of Saint-Thiery and David of Augsburg, twelfth - and thirteenth-century monastic writers still famous in the late Middle Ages.1003 Not just any manner of reading. Florent Radewijns' Little Book of Devotion instructed the devout to read with the specific purpose of uprooting vices from the soul and planting virtues. 'One ought not simply to read in order to know, but to read for knowledge' (Et non debet simpliciter studere propter scire, vel propter scienciam). He modelled the stages of vice-eradication training on Bonaventure's scheme: reading, meditation, then prayer.1004 Florent expanded Bonaventure in a practical, if pedestrian way. Connect all sacred reading to charity and the virtues. Read whole books, not just passages. Follow a schedule. Pick out points to memorise and ruminate. Let yourself be moved and pray. Choose books that lead to a pure heart and charity. The trajectory ofreading is the same as the inward trajectory ofpassional devotion, and here too Florent is hardly original.1005 Daily meditation on Christ's Passion should follow a weekly schedule, so he listed Passion-scenes by days and included admonitory prompts for meditation.

The same purposefulness, attached to Bible reading, is apparent in the clergy's most direct effort to influence congregated people, their public oratory. Like Latin and vernacular Bibles, sermons comprised not a pure but a 'fluid genre', an 'intermediary discourse', which coincided with efforts at religious conversion and self-formation.1006 Hearing, perhaps more so than reading, was supposed to perform the union of scriptural narrative to a soul shaped by virtues. The preacher was subject to inspiration, following the presupposition of a holy and inspired continuum reaching from biblical writers to modern readers.1007 This continuum was originally a clerical presupposition, as we have seen. Preaching, together with the Bibles, commentaries and semi-biblical adaptations we have examined, had long been primarily a clerical affair, in universities, among monks in their cloisters, and at church councils and courts (the papal court was the most prestigious preaching venue). But since the thirteenth century, preaching followed the avenues of monastic influence into beguinages, hospitals, lay religious orders and con-fraternities.1008 Sermons occurred on Sundays and feast days, alongside rogation processions or upon the announcement of special graces, along procession routes, and in the parish churches of cities and suburbs, cathedrals, monastery churches, princely chapels, royal halls and public squares.1009 Of all the media of biblical knowledge, we can assume that more people experienced this oral one than any other, for the simple reason that the vast majority of readers could hear, but far from all hearers could read.

The question is, what kind of biblical literacy did sermons represent or promote? As in so much of our knowledge of fifteenth-century religion in Europe, there remains a great deal to be learned, not only about sermon production, but also about the transmission and use of older collections.1010 Two general observations are permissible. First, the biblical literacy of preaching surely included a scholastic presupposition about divine speech, namely, that holy discourse, like ancient prophecy, reflected the mingling of divine and human wills and voices. But this presupposition may have become less compelling than the later idea that good sermons replicated scriptural eloquence, an idea that reflected a humanistic framework of classical rhetoric.1011 Second, the religious knowledge evident in sermons was consistent with the animated text of the Bible, as conceived in the Latin and vernacular biblical and semi-biblical literature we have considered.

This is suggested, in part, by scholastic models of the sermon. The 'modern' sermon form, promoted throughout Europe since the late thirteenth century in manuals of the Artes praedicandi, departed from the simple exposition of biblical narratives, phrase by phrase, which was known in ancient Christian preaching.1012 In the modern sermon, a theme was usually taken from a Gospel lesson, cited in Latin, and developed by a series of divisions or distinctions that organised the discourse according to a more or less dialectical architecture combining material from the Bible, church fathers, philosophers, theologians and other ancient writers.1013 Mystical sermons, which we might expect to emphasise religious subjectivity, usually followed the same kind of structure.1014 The method of interpretation in 'modern' sermons matched patterns found in scholastic Bible commentaries, which associated the words and ideas of a passage's literal sense with contemporary ideas, religious affects or moral instruction.1015 This may seem to overwhelm biblical meaning with extraneous ideas, but the Bible was the most heavily cited source in sermons, among the typical melange of scholastic authorities and moral exempla: 'the biblical verse is the root from which springs the tree of the sermon'.1016 The point was to connect biblical literature to religious truth and its subjective consequences. Commentaries were intended to produce the same effect.1017 Celebrity preachers intensified the subjective effect of the sermon in public spectacles before mass audiences, for example, Vincent Ferrer, John of Capistrano, Bernardino of Siena and Girolamo Savonarola, coupling their condemnations of luxury, feuding and narcissism with demands for immediate conversion in the face of apocalyptic doom, the endpoint of biblical history.1018 Perhaps their preaching had less to do with the internal re-imaging of biblical narratives, familiar in devotion to the Passion of Christ, than with the repetition of moral demands that belonged to an internalised gospel.1019 In England, at least, the modern sermon never completely

Displaced the ancient form, and the line between ancient and modern sermons should not be too sharply drawn, lest we take Wyclif s dismissal of scholastic preaching (the sophistry of friars, he said) at face value.102 Such a dismissal reduces the variety of late medieval preachers to a false contrast, between Bible supporters and detractors. Rather, biblical literacy belonged to an animated text entangled with all manner of formal religious expression.

The sermon's coupling of diverse sources with biblical discourse is entirely consistent with the late medieval Bible as a cultural artefact. Biblical narratives, it was believed, transmitted and received meanings between the Bible, other writings and oral texts. The intentions of God, it was thought, collimated all these past and present human reflections into one bright signal of truth. This was a very idealistic view of a complicated and elusive book. It allowed interpretation to accommodate innumerable, contestable uses of Scripture, while posing as an almighty univocal voice. The fifteenth-century Bible did not cause lay rebellion or anti-clericalism, although it was sometimes associated with them, nor could the clerical hierarchy or a particular ideology entirely control interpretation. All people interested in Scripture must have agreed that its function was identical to the spiritual purpose of the church - gradually restoring human beings to an ideal form of life, salvation. Yet so benevolently disguised, the Bible could infiltrate and unsettle any region of late medieval Europe's cultural worlds.

Druckgraphik', in Andreas Curtius, ed., Spiegel der Seligkeit: Privates Bild und Frommigkeit im Spatmittelalter (Nuremberg: Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2000), 69-83, here 79. Consider also Ghosh, The Wyclifite Heresy, 162-4, on devout imagination and reason. For the use of images in the lay cultivation of affect, consider Frank Matthias Kammel, 'Imago pro domo. Private religiose Bilder und ihre Benutzung im Spatmittelalter', in Curtius, ed., Spiegel der Seligkeit, 10-33, especially 18-25, the literature noted there, and Sixten Ringbom, From Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo: Abo Akademie, 1965; 2nd edn, Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984).

102 For this and the following, see Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, 143-5, 228-68, here 230. Consider also Schiewer, 'German Sermons', 911-14.