In 1927, when Beryl Smalley began to study the Bible in the Middle Ages, I think it would be true to say that the Bible had almost no place in the minds of medieval historians. The strongly constitutional emphasis of the Oxford historical school of Stubbs and the tutors in Oxford, and the elaboration of this tradition by his pupils Tout and Tait in Manchester, was distinctly hostile to the intrusion of unsubstantial intellectual distractions into the business of the historian. It was generally understood of course that the Bible became important as a moving force in politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it could be left out of account, so it seemed, during the preceding thousand years. And this was not just an English phenomenon.

It has long been recognized that the mainspring of Bede’s intellectual work throughout his life was pastoral. Recently it has become increasingly apparent that his dedication to the continuing demands of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons was stimulated and informed by the ideas of Gregory the Great. What is less clear is the relationship between the great bulk of Bede’s exegetical writings and his conception of the precise needs of those priests and monks whom he was seeking to prepare for pastoral responsibility. He had a certain amount of immediate personal experience of the range of technical problems involved in communicating the essentials of Christian doctrine and liturgy to an illiterate people who were ignorant of Latin.

When the court chaplain Wipo produced his Gesta Chuonradi in 1046 as an instruction in kingship for the young Henry III, he prefaced it with an indictment of contemporary writers’ laziness in failing to chronicle the deeds of their great men, although convenient models had been provided by pagan authors and Old Testament historians. The latter, in describing David’s single combats, Solomon’s counsel, Gideon’s magnanimity, and the battles of the Maccabees, had created a remarkable series of biographies illustrative of the different ways in which a man could serve the common weal. Their achievement deserved imitation. The main drift of Wipo’s argument is unfortunately too broad a theme for discussion here. What concerns us is simply that for him the Maccabees were the archetypes of heroic warriors, and that he expected his audience to be as familiar with their exploits as he was himself.

In the history of medieval Bible studies the tenth century in Beryl Smalley’s own words brought a sudden interruption, a dramatic pause, and any reader of her magnum opus must come away with the strong impression of a hiatus between the Carolingian commentators and the great teachers of the eleventh century, Fulbert of Chartres, Berengar of Tours, Drogo of Paris, and Lanfranc. Strangely enough she did not mention Atto of Vercelli’s elaborate and weighty Expositio in Epistolas S. Pauli, written not long after 940, which at least continued and used the massive labours of the ninth-century scholars.

Beryl Smalley has often pointed to the importance of the eleventh-century cathedral schools in the history of biblical studies, but she has also emphasized the difficulties of investigating the study of the sacred page in this century. ‘We have to eke out our knowledge by guesswork …. We are beginning to see a great movement. Though we cannot yet discern the detail, we can trace its outline, at least provisionally’. At first the outlook appears bleak. Abbot Williram of Ebersberg is found complaining c. 1060 that scholars concentrate on grammar and dialectic and neglect the Scriptures: a charge echoed a few years later by Otloh of St. Emmeram in Regensburg. However, the complaints of these monastic polemicists run directly contrary to the information coming out of the cathedral schools. Here the news is of masters abandoning profane learning in favour of sacred studies.

Herewards Kämpfe gegen Wilhelm den Eroberer haben ihn zu einem der ‘Folk Heroes of Britain’ gemacht. Zu seinen historisch gut bezeugten Taten, der Plünderung von Peterborough im Juni 1070 und dem bis 1071 von Ely aus gegen die Normannen geführten Partisanenkrieg, treten farbige Erzählungen über seine Jugend, die er als Verbannter in der Fremde verbracht haben soil, über seine Kämpfe gegen Untiere und Berserker, seine Werbung um die schöne Turfrida und seine Kundschaftergänge und Handstreiche, zu denen er sich bald als Töpfer, bald als Fischer verkleidete.

Lothario dei Conti di Segni became pope as Innocent III in 1198, at the age of thirty-seven, and for the eighteen years of his pontificate he had two chief preoccupations: to regain the Holy Land for the Church and to restore the true Faith in Europe. It is with the latter that I am concerned here, and with just one moment in his endeavour to counter the heretical tendencies and movements which had been threatening the stability of the Church for a century or more by 1198. This is the problem of vernacular versions of the Scriptures, a problem which arose, seemingly for the first time ever at this level, at the very beginning of Innocent’s pontificate. It is a well-known if not celebrated moment, and has had a place in every modern discussion of the question of vernacular versions of the Bible in the Middle Ages, since the days when S. Berger first gave it prominence in his La Bible française au moyen âge (Paris, 1884).

During her own career Beryl Smalley greatly expanded our knowledge of Peter Comestor. When she first discussed his works, Peter’s links with Peter Lombard and his activity as a commentator upon the Gospels had only recently been established. She went on to show Peter’s connections with the school of St Victor and, before she died, she explored some aspects of Peter’s glosses on the Gospels. It may therefore be appropriate to try to fit together some of the pieces of the jigsaw that we now have, and to follow the lines along which, as we can now see, Peter’s career evolved.

Parmi les apports majeurs de Beryl Smalley à notre connaissance des études bibliques au moyen âge ne figurent pas seulement la redécouverte d’André de Saint-Victor et la mise au jour de son influence considérable dans la seconde moitié du Xlle siècle et au début du XIIIe; c’est aussi par elle qu’a été révélée l’importance de l’oeuvre exégétique de Pierre le Chantre.

This article is dedicated to advancing three propositions, all in elaboration of research by Beryl Smalley:

• (1) that the Revelation exegesis of Hugh of St Cher, O.P. (c. 1195-1263; regent master at St Jacques, 1230-1235) can be securely located;

• (2) that much of the content of this exegesis is extraordinary; and

• (3) that Hugh of St Cher the great Dominican commentator on Scripture is a figment of bibliographers’ imaginations.

La Publication parmi les fascicules de la Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental du volume de Cl. Bremond, J. Le Goff, et J.-Cl, Schmitt sur l’exemplum montre les progrès qui ont été faits dans ce domaine depuis 1927, date à laquelle était parue la thèse de J.-Th. Welter du même titre. Si ce dernier reste encore un remarquable instrument, toujours utile et sou vent nécessaire à consulter, c’est dans le récent livre collectif que l’on trouvera désormais des définitions plus élaborées et des études plus précises sur la place et le rôle de l’exemplum dans le sermon, des analyses plus affinées de sa structure, des appréciations plus fournies et plus nuancées sur la portée historique et sociologique de ce genre littéraire.

The history of attitudes to marriage is a fashionable subject and has been so for some time. This does not mean that it is an overworked subject, for the field is large enough to provide work for many labourers. A corner of it which has scarcely been touched is the development of marriage doctrine in bible commentaries and sermons, two types of source which medievalists will always associate with Beryl Smalley. This paper deals only with the second class of source, but it is nevertheless about exegesis, since the sermons which will be examined have the pericope or Gospel reading of the marriage feast of Cana as their starting-point.

Among the more far-reaching consequences of the disputes over absolute poverty in the Franciscan Order was the emergence of a doctrine of natural rights. Or rather conflicting doctrines, drawn from conflicting interpretations of the life of Christ and the apostles, which crystallized in the debates between Pope John XXII and members of the Order in the 1320s and 1330s over Christ’s absolute poverty. Both the Pope, in denying that Christ had ever lived in absolute poverty, and his Franciscan opponents, who upheld the Franciscan doctrine that he had, arrived at rival conceptions of the rights involved in either possessing or renouncing temporal things.

Medieval biblical commentators traditionally interpreted the Bible in terms of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture—the literal-historical and the three ‘spiritual’ senses, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical. Recently attention has been focused on the use of a variation of the allegorical sense, namely, political allegory. This was the application of a biblical text to a current political situation or argument. The Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, after hearing Pope Clement VI preach in consistory, gave it another name altogether—sensum adulterum. Clement had apparently delivered the customary papal allegorization of the two-swords passage (Luke, xix. 38), according to which both swords, that of spiritual authority and of physical power, were in the hands of the priesthood.

In the preface to the third edition of The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages Beryl Smalley pointed out the dilemma posed by the apparently simple solution contained in the mature teaching of Thomas Aquinas, whereby the literal sense of biblical interpretation was all that the sacred writer intended. Her question as to what should be included under ‘all’ preoccupied many medieval students of Scripture.

The storm centre of John Wyclif’s quarrel with the Church was his doctrine of the Eucharist. The critic of clerical dominion over secular things and of the authority of the pope had passed through ecclesiastical censure almost unscathed; but the proponent of a revisionist theology of the eucharistic sacrament would at once lose the countenance of academic colleagues and public opinion alike, and would suffer the consequences. The crisis of Wyclif’s career came with striking rapidity after he broadcast, in his Confessio or public statement in the Oxford schools on 10 May 1381, his opinion that the presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist was figurative, ‘sacramental’, or in some sense, to anyone not acquainted with the terms of his own mental world, less than real.