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Afterword

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Frans van Liere
Affiliation:
Calvin College, Michigan
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Summary

The sixteenth century marked a watershed in the history of the Bible. The invention of the printing press in the previous century had profoundly altered notions of just what constituted a “text” and a “book.” Renaissance scholars no longer studied Hebrew and Greek as a way to correct the Latin Bible text as medieval scholars had done, but as a way to uncover the “original” Bible. The reformers challenged the authority of the Church to interpret this Bible and denied the validity of the medieval tradition of interpretation. Extra-biblical traditions, apocryphal texts, and mystical commentaries, once seen as essential to the understanding of the sacred text, came to be regarded as “monkish lore” and were dismissed as irrelevant. Although, of course, the achievements of the Renaissance and Reformation brought genuine improvements to the understanding of the Bible, one may ask whether they did not also obscure some essential elements of its history. This book has tried to recover some of this “lost” history of the Bible. I hope that it has provided students of medieval culture some insight into the peculiarities of the Bible as a sacred text and has shed some light on its place in medieval culture. But I also hope that it has done something to challenge the notion that the Middle Ages contributed little to our own understanding of the Bible.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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  • Afterword
  • Frans van Liere, Calvin College, Michigan
  • Book: An Introduction to the Medieval Bible
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511843051.011
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  • Afterword
  • Frans van Liere, Calvin College, Michigan
  • Book: An Introduction to the Medieval Bible
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511843051.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Frans van Liere, Calvin College, Michigan
  • Book: An Introduction to the Medieval Bible
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511843051.011
Available formats
×