Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation

Description

Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript sources, this study uncovers the culture of experimentation that surrounded biblical exegesis in fourteenth-century England. In an area ripe for revision, Andrew Kraebel challenges the accepted theory (inherited from Reformation writers) that medieval English Bible translations represent a proto-Protestant rejection of scholastic modes of interpretation. Instead, he argues that early translators were themselves part of a larger scholastic interpretive tradition, and that they tried to make that tradition available to a broader audience. Translation was thus one among many ways that English exegetes experimented with the possibilities of commentary. With a wide scope, the book focuses on works by writers from the heretic John Wyclif to the hermit Richard Rolle, alongside a host of lesser-known authors, including Henry Cossey and Nicholas Trevet, and many anonymous texts. The study provides new insight into the ingenuity of medieval interpreters willing to develop new literary-critical methods and embrace intellectual risks.

Andrew Kraebel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University, Texas. His essays on medieval literature and commentary have appeared in Speculum, JMEMS, and Traditio, among other journals, as well as in such volumes as Interpreting Scripture in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Overlapping Inquiries (Cambridge, 2016) and The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge, forthcoming). He is the editor of the Sermons of William of Newburgh (2010), and, with Ardis Butterfield and Ian Johnson, he is editing a collection of essays on Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, forthcoming).

'... these works adapted scholastic exegesis to meet the devotional needs of English readers ... Recommended.' D. A. Brown, Choice 'This is a highly rewarding book. Kraebel deals with a complex subject with the utmost clarity and competence. He has added important insights and conclusions of his own which enrich our understanding of a field far broader and more interesting than the reformers would admit.' Alastair Hamilton, Journal of Ecclesiastical History '... Kraebel excavates the wider field of scholastic biblical exegesis in fourteenth-century England ... Kraebel is to be commended for having reclaimed so much of later medieval England's biblical commentary from obscurity as well as for having analyzed these texts and their manuscripts so closely and carefully.' Audrey Southgate, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 'Kraebel's admirable study does much to help, and to show how those implications might be not reductive, but rather stimulating and fruitful. Potential readers should take the plunge: the rewards justify the effort.' Daniel Sawyer, Studies in the Age of Chaucer