Reading the Bible in the Middle Ages

by Janet L. Nelson (Editor), Damien Kempf (Editor)

For earlier medieval Christians, the Bible was the book of guidance above all others, and the route to religious knowledge, used for all kinds of practical purposes, from divination to models of government in kingdom or household. This book's focus is on how medieval people accessed Scripture by reading, but also by hearing and memorizing sound-bites from the liturgy, chants and hymns, or sermons explicating Scripture in various vernaculars. Time, place and social class determined access to these varied forms of Scripture. Throughout the earlier medieval period, the Psalms attracted most readers and searchers for meanings.

This book's contributors probe readers' motivations, intellectual resources and religious concerns. They ask for whom the readers wrote, where they expected their readers to be located and in what institutional, social and political environments they belonged; why writers chose to write about, or draw on, certain parts of the Bible rather than others, and what real-life contexts or conjunctures inspired them; why the Old Testament so often loomed so large, and how its law-books, its histories, its prophetic books and its poetry were made intelligible to readers, hearers and memorizers. This book's contributors, in raising so many questions, do justice to both uniqueness and diversity.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2015

About the author

Dame Janet Laughland Nelson, also known as Jinty Nelson, was a British historian and professor of Medieval History at King's College London.

Reviews

[Roland Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

People use the Bible in very different ways. Some meditate on individual verses, others read whole chapters or books at a time, while others just use their Bibles to beat each other over the head with. Living in our post-Christian world, it is tempting to think that the lives of Christians in ages past were more deeply shaped by their relationships with Scripture. The revival of Benedictine practices such as lectio divina encourage that sort of view of the Middle Ages, but as the contributors to this volume argue, when medieval Christians picked up their Bibles they did so in ways that were just as diverse and as petty as ours. Just as some people today have their favourite books and ignore most of the others, Christians in the Middle Ages also read their Bibles very selectively. As the editors remind us, “the Bible was very seldom available as a whole but far more often in parts – the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels – and, as far as laypeople were concerned, in memorized sound-bites in the liturgy, in chants and hymns, or in sermons, or in legal records of gifts to churches. A single-volume Bible might belong to an episcopal church, or a big monastery, carried and shown as a sacred ritual object in processions, or revered on the altar from afar. Lay Bible-owners were extremely few, and almost all were high-born. For private purposes, clergy, monks, laypeople alike, if literate, were far more likely to read a psalter (central to monastic prayer), or a ‘brief collection; (breviary, or Book of Hours) consisting of select psalms augmented by prayers and hymns.”

Read my full review here: https://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/07/...