The Glossed Bible is the meeting place for all the themes of this volume. Its history encompasses the selection of a particular Bible text; its content is inseparable from its format; it is a keystone of biblical interpretation; it poses difficult questions about the way the Bible was used; and its confluence of text and glosses makes a physical statement of the Bible transformed. For the schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the sacra pagina – sacred page – as scripture was known, consisted not merely in the biblical text on its own, but in the text surrounded by a panoply of post-biblical glosses. Together, they were included in sacred scripture as defined by Hugh of St Victor: the Old and New Testaments, the decrees of canon law and the writings of the fathers and doctors of the church. Bibles with short glosses, or explanations, written in the margins, were not new; but the Gloss (Glossa or Glosa in Latin) produced in the twelfth century took this basic concept and turned it into the ubiquitous text of the scholastic world. How and why this happened is a tangled tale, which we will need to unravel without oversimplifying, for there are genuine complexities to this story.

The story has two main stages: the first covers the genesis and making of the Gloss and its early circulation among a small group of scholars in northern France; the second outlines the mushrooming spread of the Gloss in mass-produced copies all over Europe. If this second phase had not happened, we would barely be interested in the first; but in fact from about 1135 to the end of the century so many copies of Glossed Bibles were made that they are amongst the most common twelfth-century manuscripts extant today, heavily outnumbering copies of the unglossed biblical text.