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The Bible is the most widely read book in the world. From the transcription of the Old Testament to Greek, to the collection of the Gospels, the Bible has always been in a state of literary and scholarly transition. In her classic work, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Beryl Smalley describes the changes in the organization, technique, and purpose of Bible studies in northwestern Europe from the Carolingian renaissance to about 1300. This was the period when the emergence of Aristotelian thought inspired medieval scholars to take a fresh look at the Scriptures. The large number of medieval commentaries on the Bible confirms that they did so and that they expressed their reactions in writing.
Medieval historians and students of literature will find special value in this book: they will learn, in systematic fashion, what earlier scholars have accomplished in the field of exegesis; and they will be enabled to employ the history of biblical interpretation recounted here as a mirror for the social and cultural upheavals that were taking place simultaneously.
"The core of the book is the chapters devoted to the Victorines—the regular canons of St. Victor at Paris who being both scholares and claustrales formed a bridge to cover the gulf which had arisen between monks and schoalrs, the devotional and the intellectual aspects." –The English Hisotrical Review
Beryl Smalley (1905–1984) was a British historian. She was a tutor in history and former vice-Principal at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.