Interpretive Theories and Traditions

In the middle decades of the fourteenth century, Henry of Kirkestede  (d. c. ), librarian and later prior of Bury St. Edmunds, compiled his Catalogus de Libris Autenticis et Apocrifis. Now preserved only in Thomas Tanner’s seventeenth-century transcription, the Catalogus is an alphabetic listing of nearly seven hundred classical and medieval authors, their works, and a selection of the English libraries in which those works could be found. Following the catalogue proper, Henry includes an index recording the “nomina doctorum qui scribunt super Bibliam” (“names of doctors who write about the Bible”), essentially a listing of commentaries organized, generally, by biblical book (Fig. ). For each book, Henry seems to have assembled an initial list of commentators drawn from the catalogue, with additional names appended out of alphabetical order at the end of each list, perhaps indicating that the index, like the catalogue itself, was a work-inprogress. Indeed, Henry must have updated the index and catalogue independently of one another, since some of the authors added to the index do not appear in the catalogue, and many exegetes noted in the catalogue are omitted from the index. An invaluable bibliographical resource, the Catalogus indicates how widely different texts circulated in fourteenth-century England, and the index in particular records (albeit imperfectly) the range of biblical commentaries on which later medieval English exegetes could draw. At the same time, in the way its offerings are organized, the index can help to illustrate an important and largely unappreciated aspect of medieval commentary – namely, the range of distinct interpretive priorities and practices that developed surrounding different books of the Bible. It has become customary, following the work of Beryl Smalley, to discuss the history of medieval biblical scholarship in terms of the varying fortunes of the literal and spiritual senses, with Smalley’s narrative of the rise of literalistic exegesis challenged (though not, I think, overturned) by Henri de Lubac’s insistence on the continued importance ofmystical meanings.This emphasis on general interpretive theories, however, shared by Smalley and de Lubac,