How the Glossed Page Conducts Thought: Literal and Allegorical Ductus in Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla and Some Later Glossed Bibles

TL;DRAbstract

Henri de Lubac influentially argued in his four-volume Medieval Exegesis that after Nicholas of Lyra’s postilla on the Bible in the fourteenth century, literal and spiritual exegesis became divorced, leading to the Protestant valorization of textually immanent meaning over and against theologically informed reading, and so eventually to the modern disciplinary chasm between historical-critical biblical studies and theology. Drawing on contemporary examples of glossed and unglossed Bibles, indexes, and concordances from the library of the Abbey of Clairvaux (now in Troyes), I will argue that Nicholas’s “literal turn,” far from inaugurating a rupture in exegetical theory, more fundamentally marks a return to a particular readerly ductus and style of commentary found in the Glossa ordinaria and its foremost authority on the literal sense, Jerome. I will conclude by considering how this glossarial nostalgia compares to that of the Geneva Bible.

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