The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.

Middle english biblical translations often seem to be readerless texts. This is not to say that they lack the kinds of readerly annotations commonly found in late medieval manuscripts – underlining, bracketing, maniculae, nota marks, even more substantial marginalia – but rather that they are often presented as though their translators do not have a specific reader in mind. Indeed, the author of the prologue to one of the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels envisions himself writing for all of “þe pore men of [þis] nacioun, which kunnen litil Latyn eþer noon,” while the Prologue to the Later Version Wycliffite Bible describes the translators’ “comyn charite to saue alle men in oure rewme which God wole haue saued.” Similarly, though the anonymous translator of a Middle English commentary on Matthew cites an unnamed individual who “styrde” him to begin the work, he says that he undertook it, generally, for the “many lewd men … þat gladly wold kon þe Gospell, if it were draghen into Englisch tung.” Even Richard Rolle’s English Psalter, dubiously associated with the anchoress Margaret Kirkby in a later copy, seems to imagine an audience defined simply in terms of language: “þai þat knawes noght Latyn.” All of which would set these biblical translations apart from the larger body of religious literature in Middle English, devotional texts that are at least presented as occasional, as written to meet the needs of a specific known reader or group of readers, though of course with awareness of their inevitable wider circulation. Hence, perhaps most famously, the direct address to Kirkby at the end of Rolle’s Form of Living, or the “ghostly sister in Jhesu Christ” interpellated at the start of Book I of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, the “dere broþir in Crist” of Hilton’s Mixed Life, the “religious sister” of Doctrine of the Hert, or the eponymous addressee of Book to a Mother. The impersonal address of Middle English Bibles, in contrast, may reflect the status of these texts as translations, with the rendering of pre-existing material presenting fewer opportunities to respond to the idiosyncrasies of individual readers – beyond, of course, a general interest in accessing the text in the first place.

This chapter focuses on unedited and largely unstudied Middle English commentaries on Matthew. In all of these texts, vernacular exegetes turned to Matthew primarily for the book’s moral teaching, and, in line with the arguments advanced in Chapter 1, they favored moralizing glosses without concern for how these interpretations fit into the different senses of Scripture. This chapter begins with consideration of a vernacular commentary likely produced in Durham Priory in the second half of the fourteenth century, almost certainly inspired by the precedent of Rolle. It then takes up the most ambitious work (or collection of works) of English vernacular exegesis, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, tracing their compilers’ changing ways of handling the various components of the vernacular exegetical form – close translation, gloss, and citation. The long and short recensions of their commentary on Matthew are compared at length, and the chapter concludes with a new discussion of Wycliffite interpretive theory in light of these unfortunately neglected texts.

The relationship between scholastic biblical commentary and translation recovered in the foregoing chapters posed problems for reformist Tudor writers, who sought precedents for their vernacular biblicism in Middle English writings. This Epilogue focuses on the work of John Bale, describing the tensions in Bale’s commitment to cataloguing the literature of medieval England, including the commentaries studied here, and his desire to identify medieval English translators as early coreligionists. Although Bale is able to find a place for commentary (even some medieval scholastic commentary) in reformist biblical reading, his approach to vernacular exegesis and translation leads him to obscure the place of medieval biblical translation in the larger project of scholastic exegesis. The resulting distinction between the work of commentary and translation has had a long scholarly afterlife, one which this study seeks to set right.