The application of humanist scholarship to the Bible has often been reckoned among the ‘causes’ of the Reformation. A teleological dialectic that set obscurantist scholasticism in opposition to progressive humanism furnished much twentieth-century historiography with a convenient perspective in which to place both Luther's emergence and the hostile reaction to his ideas. Nor was this without a pedigree: the quip ‘Erasmus laid the eggs that Luther hatched’ was coined in the 1520s, and the narrowing orthodoxies of the Counter-Reformation squeezed Erasmian ideas out of the church to which he steadfastly professed allegiance. As so often, however, hindsight is a poor guide. Humanist biblical scholarship before the Reformation was neither a crescendo of theological provocation nor the subject of intense controversy, though it did arouse occasional disquiet. What made humanist biblical scholarship controversial was the Reformation crisis itself, which changed both the immediate and the historical perspective on the humanist, and especially the Erasmian, scriptural project. Luther, in making theology the stuff of popular controversy, dragged biblical philology into the public arena as well. In those turbulent years it was not just scholastics but also humanists who could find themselves troubled by the challenges that humanist scholarship could pose to traditional theology.

The Italian prelude

A common but misleading distinction used to be drawn between the ‘Renaissance humanism’ of Italy – pagan, epicurean and shallow – and the ‘Northern humanism’ that later flourished beyond the Alps – Christian, austere and profound. The pioneering work of Charles Trinkaus, followed up since by many other scholars, has done much to dispel this traditional misapprehension, although its long shadow continues to stretch over the subject. But as Trinkaus argued, early ‘humanism’ was Christian: humanist scholars in fifteenth-century Italy applied themselves and their critical techniques to early Christian as well as to classical literature, and to scriptural as well as to patristic texts.

The first Italian scholar to bring the techniques of humanist philology to bear upon the sacred texts was that most original and influential figure, Lorenzo Valla. In Lent 1443, while working at the court of Naples, he began making a systematic comparison of the Latin of the Vulgate New Testament with what he revealingly termed the Graeca veritas (by analogy with the established term Hebraica veritas for the Hebrew Old Testament).

The Bible in Reformed Protestantism was treated both theologically and textually, and the focus of attention was on the literal, historical–grammatical reading of the text. Interpretation, translation and editing focused on the received canonical text and its various meanings, with particular attention to the problems presented by the relationship between individual parts of the Bible and the whole. Beginning with the circle of Reformed biblical scholars in Basel, Zurich and Strasbourg the tradition that emerged along the Upper Rhine was deeply indebted to the critical methods of Erasmus, with an emphasis on languages and the rhetorical sense. Jewish sources, including the Bomberg Bible, formed a major part of Reformed thinking in both the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, not only on account of the vowel points but through the questions of interpretation posed by the Hebrew tradition. Methodologies of reading occupied the Reformed writers, with Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger and Wolfgang Musculus, among others, producing works on correct approaches to Scripture and the necessity of ancient languages. Interpretation, however, was not an end in itself, and a distinct part of the Reformed approach was continued emphasis on the role assumed by exegesis in serving the practical, devotional life of the church. A significant question in this regard was the respective roles of the Spirit and the human authors, and among the Reformed a range of responses was to be found. This would shift towards a strong doctrine of verbal inspiration in the seventeenth century as the Reformed Orthodox sought to respond to the philosophical positions of Spinoza and the more radical implications of textual criticism. Likewise in the theological readings of Scripture important differences can be detected concerning such questions as the Christological reading of the Old Testament; the Zurich scholars, for instance, found typologies for Christ throughout the text, while Calvin, as has been recently argued, was more reticent. The Reformed emphasis was on the reading of the whole text, and this was reflected in the fecund culture of biblical commentary on all the books of the Bible.

The Reformed scholars were deeply rooted in the study of Hebrew and Greek, and a major part of the intellectual project of the Reformation was the establishment of reliable editions of the original languages.

One of the basic acts of worship in the Christian church, as in the synagogue, is the public systematic reading and preaching of the Holy Scriptures. Moses set the example in the worship at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exod. 24:1–11). Ezra recovered the practice when he reconstituted the worship of the sacred nation in the square before the water gate (Neh. 8:1–18), and Jesus himself honoured the tradition when he preached in the synagogue of Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30). This chapter will review how this fundamental act of worship was practised from the age of the Reformation to the age of Pietism.

The Middle Ages had known much good preaching. The Franciscans and Dominicans particularly had devoted themselves to popular preaching. For the most part this took two forms, the preaching of the Gospels and Epistles of the lectionary and the preaching of the annual Advent and Lenten missions. There was a great deal of this preaching. It was carefully cultivated and generously supported. The problem was that in time it had become conventionalised. Its methods had been used to the point of tedium and its message was familiar. Preachers such as Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) had written out both his lectionary sermons and his mission sermons, so that other preachers could use them all over Europe. His sermons conveyed much biblical material as he called people to emulate the repentance of Mary Magdalene, the prodigal son or the thief on the cross. His sermons were true classics, their only fault being that they were over-used by preachers who lacked the spiritual intensity and oratorical gifts of their original preacher.

At the end of the Middle Ages there was no greater master of the homiletical art than Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445–1510), preacher at the cathedral of Strasbourg. He used all the techniques of oratory. He was a passionate defender of the Nominalist piety in which he had been reared. Skilled in the art of pulpit oratory, he was a most popular preacher. The biblical materials that his sermons did contain were overshadowed by all kinds of exempla and illustrative material, so that too often one lost the sense that the sermon was an exposition of Scripture.

In a 2010 interview about his decades-long fight against South African apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu described his ‘[discovery] that the Bible could be such dynamite … If these white people had intended keeping us under,’ he went on to say, ‘they shouldn't have given us the Bible.’ The Bible, for Tutu and his supporters, could be a powerful weapon in the hands of any revolutionary struggling for justice. Its power came from its ability to function as a transcendent source of authority that could challenge the claims to legitimacy of unjust but long-established political institutions.

Tutu's ‘discovery’ ultimately has its historical roots in the complex events of the early modern period. During this time the spread of printing and the subsequent rise in literacy, the emergence of new forms of European religious pluralism alongside the increasing dominance of the modern territorial state, and shifting attitudes about the nature of authority and its relationship to texts – among other factors – laid the foundation for a profound reorientation in the Bible's political meaning. In this chapter we will adumbrate the trajectory of that change. The Reformation and its forerunners, such as Lollardy in England, initially cast the Bible in the role of an incendiary weapon, rendering ordinary Christians capable of combating, destabilising and overturning long-established authorities. Over several generations, however, strong countervailing tendencies began to emerge, reframing the biblical text as an instrument of conservatism and retrenchment, best suited for the defence of the political status quo.

In the cultural and religious landscape of early modern Europe individuals and communities drew political meanings from the biblical text using distinctive styles and strategies for reading and appropriation. To understand the political role of the Bible and the ideas taken from its text, we need to recognise the critical differences between these reading strategies and how their use changed over time during the period we are examining. We can recognise the existence of three distinct such reading strategies, which, for the sake of convenience, I will here call ‘modes’. In political settings, most early modern interactions between reader and scriptural text tend to fall into one of the following categories, although a degree of overlap is to be expected. First, and probably most intuitively familiar to modern readers, is the proof-texting mode.

The Bible is no doubt the single most important source for texts in the music of the early modern period. Liturgical music was of course based on biblical texts, but compositions that can be classified as texts of domestic devotion also refer to the words of both Old and New Testaments. Because of the similarities in these two types of text it can be quite difficult to determine with any certainty whether a specific piece is derived from a liturgical or non-liturgical source. It is also beyond the scope of this overview to examine in detail all of the different ways in which biblical texts were used in music, and the ways in which music was used to interpret biblical texts. The amount of material available is simply too great. The approach in this study is therefore to illustrate the main trends by means of a series of representative case studies.

It is important to remember that music, like any art form, has its own inherent rules which are manifest on a syntactic level (harmony, melody) and also in the way that various genres are used. Theological history and musical history do not always develop in the same direction, and great caution should be exercised when making theological interpretations of musical works. Sometimes composers respond to theological shifts and sometimes, as in the case of the oratorio of the Counter-Reformation, religious music selects and adapts ideas that have already become established in secular music, such as those found in opera, for example.

An important question in the study of the relationship between music and the Bible is what exactly music contributes beyond a simple presentation of the text. To what extent does music add some kind of extra ‘value’ when biblical texts are reproduced? Music can highlight particular sections, or even individual words, and thereby add an emphasis which in itself is a type of interpretation. Music can also add emotional content to a text, as for example when the emotions contained in the words, such as joy, sadness etc., are amplified in the music. It is also possible to have a dialectical opposition between the music and the text, with the result that the music challenges or ironises the text.

Tyndale

Modern translation of the Bible into English begins with and is pre-eminently shaped by William Tyndale, a gifted scholar, linguist and writer of English. His claim that he ‘had no man to counterfeit [imitate], neither was helped with English of any that had interpreted the same or suchlike thing in the Scripture beforetime’ is not a denial that there were earlier English translations but a statement that the Wyclif Bible did not offer a model for translation from the original languages or for the use of the everyday English of the early sixteenth century. He created that model, translating the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek, and the Old Testament as far as the end of Chronicles, together with Jonah, from the Hebrew. Miles Coverdale revised and completed Tyndale's work. Thereafter a series of Bibles revised Tyndale and Coverdale's work until it became the King James Bible (KJB) or Authorised Version of 1611. In turn that became the prime model for later translations. Without Tyndale, the English Bible would have been a different and, very likely, a lesser thing.

Tyndale responded to ‘a learned man’ who had declared that ‘we were better be without God's law than the Pope's’, ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws… if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’ Scripture, not the Catholic Church, gave God's word to man. Though he had hoped to find support from the Church, there was none to be had. Indeed, there was no place for such heretical work in England. He went to Belgium and Germany, and translated in peril, at last being martyred in Belgium.

His desire to write for the ploughboy determined the kind of language he should use: it had to be everyday English, not literary or ecclesiastical (registers that were hardly available at that time except through imitation of Latin). to the individual, both internally through baptism and through the Bible.It was a major problem to know how to translate: should he be literal or should he paraphrase? Should he trust the text to speak for itself or should he use annotation to explain the meaning?

The early modern religious history of Central and Eastern Europe is notable for its diversity of churches and faiths. The region included both Latin and Orthodox Churches, and also a growing number of confessional rivals who emerged from movements of reform including Hussites, Bohemian Brethren, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Anti-Trinitarians and Greek Catholics. Although monarchs and rulers mostly remained faithful to either the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches, reformers found support among magnates and nobles, and in towns. In the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth, in the lands of the Bohemian Crown and in the territories of the Hungarian kingdom this noble backing for movements of religious reform was largely successful in ensuring protection from any heresy prosecutions. Agreements between monarchs and their estates then offered legal rights to Protestant churches from the latter half of the sixteenth century. However, from the early decades of the seventeenth century both the Habsburgs and the kings of Poland were able to undermine these agreements and to erode the legal rights of non-Catholics. Many Protestant nobles across the region converted back to the Catholic Church, leaving non-Catholic clergy and congregations increasingly vulnerable and isolated. The revival of Catholicism across Central Europe during the seventeenth century included efforts by courts and the clergy hierarchy to reverse Protestant gains, but also extended to gaining ground among Orthodox communities by supporting the development of Greek Catholic churches.

The production of Bibles in the vernacular languages of Central and Eastern Europe during this period reflected this changing political and religious landscape, and was related to the rise and fall of Protestantism among different linguistic communities. Bibles were first printed during the late fifteenth century by those who believed that it would broaden and deepen understanding of Christian religion. The production of vernacular Bibles from the mid-sixteenth century was particularly linked to attempts to advance different reform movements. Clerics worked to provide vernacular versions of the Scriptures for their own linguistic communities, and Bibles were also produced in mission efforts to advance reform among neighbouring vernacular communities. The production and reception of vernacular Bibles was also shaped by the small number of centres of book production and by low levels of literacy.

The use of the Bible during the period between around 1500 and 1750 cannot be understood without considering the influences upon the intellectual climate of the centuries between the late Middle Ages and the rise of the modern world. There was no break between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The so-called Middle Ages served as a bridge transporting characteristic traditions from Classical Antiquity to later times. Broadly speaking there were three main tendencies. Humanism (which flourished in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in Holland as far as the seventeenth, but remained influential much later) inherited from Antiquity, mediated by ecclesiastical theology and the study of classical sources, the following modes of thought:

1. 1. Moralism, particularly in the Stoic tradition. Stoic authors were popular with the intellectual elite, especially in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Also, the theory of natural law was of Stoic origin.

2. 2. Reason, too, was a classical heritage. The Aristotelian tradition, after a revival by Arabic mediation (Averroes, 1126–98), was kept alive through the use of Aristotelian rationality in the scholastic dogmatic systems. Later rationalistic approaches, such as Cartesianism (René Descartes, 1596–1650) gained only a temporary restricted influence.

3. 3. Also, historical viewpoints played an important role already in humanism with its call ad fontes (to the sources). The method intended to restore the best available form of texts was textual criticism. During the period we have in view we can observe a growing consciousness that all written documents are time-bound and imprinted with the cultural characteristics of their times. This insight could conflict with the official dogma of verbal inspiration, which regarded each verse of the Bible as inspired, unconditioned and free of error.

Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the first who (in his edition of the New Testament, Novum Instrumentum, 1516) used textual criticism for restoring the text of the New Testament. Textual criticism has retained its importance since then. Besides, Erasmus's intention was, in a spiritualistic and anti-ceremonial vein, a reform of the church on the basis of the New Testament and the Church Fathers. The Erasmian Hugo Grotius (de Groot; 1583–1645) worked in the spirit of toleration between the confessions and hoped for a reunification of the church on the basis of Bible and patristic theology.

The Latin Bible occupies a paradoxical space in the history of the Bible in the early modern period in Europe. On one hand, all scholars from the sixteenth century onwards were acutely aware that the Latin Bible was a translation; it was not the authentic text, the fons et origo, for any of the biblical books. On the other hand, it was certainly not a translation like any other. Latin occupied a unique place in the culture of Europe. Until at least around 1700, while Latin had long since ceased to be the living language of a people, it remained the shared vehicle for scholarly communication across the Latin churches – including those that became reformed – and those regions where the Roman alphabet prevailed. Scholars of only modest education would at least be able to read Latin. Consequently, the faithful of Europe had a stake in the Latin Bible which vastly exceeded the level of interest in Bibles in any one regional vernacular. Latin translations could expect to be used – and to be criticised – on an international scale.

Moreover, though not original, the Latin Bible was an ancient text. More than a thousand years of exegesis, glossing and theology had grown from its words, often quite literally interpreted, as though it were no translation at all. That carapace of interpretation loaded the most commonly received translation, the Latin Vulgate, with some of the authority and responsibility of a sacred text. In the course of the sixteenth century the Roman Catholic Church would canonise this special status of the Vulgate for centuries to come. Consequently, and uniquely of all the translations to be discussed in this section, the Latin Vulgate experienced two kinds of scholarly attention at the same time. On one hand, as an ancient text it called for textual editing: biblical scholars aimed to retrieve it in its most authentic, original form (however that was conceived). In effect, the Vulgate underwent textual criticism and recovery in a way quite analogous to the scriptural texts in their original languages, or indeed to the sources of classical literature where textual criticism had first begun. A ‘corrected’ Vulgate became an objective of scholarly endeavour in itself.

The Lutheran Reformation had a profound impact on how the Bible is used in Christian discourse. In fact, that influence was so compelling that, for many, ‘Reformation’ and ‘Bible’ are inextricably linked. If there were a single image that best represents the Reformation, then it would probably be the Bible. At times, though, that association is so strong that it obliterates historical nuance and even leads to distorted assumptions about the Reformation as a whole. Statements such as ‘Luther rescued the Bible from papal tyranny’, ‘the Reformation gave the Bible back to the people’ or ‘the Catholic church banned Bible-reading’ are among the more popular of the (typically Protestant) generalisations which, at the very least, need heavy qualification. (Catholic polemicists circulate their own distortions of the Reformation, of course, but those are less pertinent to this particular issue.) In order to appreciate the Lutheran Reformation's impact on the role of the Bible in Christian theology, one therefore needs to step back from traditional confessional narratives and take a closer look at the historical evidence.

Prior to the Reformation, religious interest in the Bible was remarkably strong. The late medieval age saw an enormously rich devotional life, which in turn led to the formation of countless religious communities – both for laypeople and clergy. Many of these communities showed an interest in reading the Bible and came together in devotional Bible studies. Perhaps more important than the interest itself, however, is the fact that it was often met. Especially in the German-speaking lands, Bibles were not at all rare before Luther's translation appeared, and laypeople's access to the Bible was not prohibited as a general rule. Publication statistics show that, within the Holy Roman Empire between 1450 and 1519, printers produced sixty-five Latin editions of the Bible and no fewer than twenty-two editions in some form of vernacular German. According to some estimates there were more than 20,000 copies of vernacular Bibles in Germany prior to the Reformation. In Italy, too, there were numerous vernacular Bibles during the late 1400s. France, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this chapter, had far fewer vernacular Bibles before the Reformation, though Latin Bibles were as common there as elsewhere.

If there is a clear biblical reference to ‘colonial thought’, it is undoubtedly Jesus’ injunction to his disciples to ‘go and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matt. 28:19). For the best part of its history, however, the church seems to have remained comfortably oblivious to this aspect of its divinely entrusted mission. It was not until well into the sixteenth century that Christians began to take seriously their role as ‘missionaries’ as the word is understood nowadays; that is, a specialised section of the church entrusted with the instruction and conversion of non-Christians through the careful exposition of a clear set of doctrines and beliefs. It would be tempting to interpret the church's previous comparative lack of interest as the result of wilful neglect; but this would ignore the way in which Christian thinkers came to understand the nature of the church's mission during the first centuries of her history. The tremendous formative importance of those centuries for the subsequent development of Christian thought would be impossible to exaggerate; so before our topic can be fruitfully addressed, it is important to have a clear idea of the main assumptions that arose at that time in relation to non-Christians.

The background

By the time of Constantine's conversion in 312 the church had survived the perils of heresy and schism that threatened its early history and had responded to the persecution of the imperial power by organising itself along the lines of a universal hierarchical society capable of standing against the pagan worldstate. From there it was but a small step to the recognition of the Christian faith as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Quite apart from any considerations of Constantine's sincerity, it was clear to everyone that the order and universality of the Christian church had turned the church into the ideal spiritual ally and complement to the universal empire.

Pre-modern people believed that the history of the world held transparent meaning. History displayed the working out of the plans, and the judgements, of God. Divine sovereignty dictated not only the history of human salvation through the progressive revelation of the divine purposes, but also the rise and fall of peoples and empires. Consequently, preachers, theologians and historians turned to Scripture for guidance as to how the divine plan was working itself out. The Christian reading of Scripture became absolutely fundamental to the structure and understanding of human history. In the early modern period the reading of world history acquired, like nearly every other intellectual activity, a confessional and dogmatic edge. Antagonists in the tormented ideological struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appealed to the Bible to prove that their objectives and their experiences – including their sufferings – had been written up in prophecy and could be integrated into a comprehensible pattern of human destiny. However, the quest for biblical endorsement of partisan views of history ultimately disillusioned those who tried to fathom it out. The quest for scriptural clues to world history took on a tragic aspect as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed. The more closely scholars examined the sources, the more elusive the old certainties about world history seemed to become. Ultimately, in the late eighteenth century some thinkers confronted the fact that the world was vastly older than the Bible suggested; that human history could not be crammed in to fit schemes derived from ancient Hebrew prophecy; and that even the universe itself might be a self-sustaining system of vast antiquity, built by the forces of chance and evolution.

The medieval prologue

The European Middle Ages bequeathed to the Renaissance era certain assumptions about the cosmos. First, the universe was a relatively small place, composed of the Earth at the centre with two or three elemental spheres around it: wrapped around the Earth were the spheres of the planets (including the Moon and the Sun); beyond those in turn, a slightly variable range of outermost concentric spheres (firmament, primum mobile, empyrean) of which only the sphere of fixed stars was visible from the earth.

This volume in the New Cambridge History of the Bible has, like its companions in the series, been the work of many hands and of more years than any of us intended. Throughout it all I have appreciated and benefited from the help and support of Kate Brett and Laura Morris, successive religion and theology editors at Cambridge University Press. Their encouragement and occasional spurring-on has enabled me to believe that I could complete editing a project of this size while heavily committed in so many other areas.

My thanks go out above all to the many contributors who have made this volume possible. To those authors who wrote their contributions early in the process, and have endured patiently while the volume reached its final form, I owe infinite thanks for their promptness, civility, and tolerance. To those authors who bravely took on the most challenging, complex commissions and wrote, often under pressure of time, works of astonishing scope, I offer my admiration as well as gratitude. All alike have collaborated in the book's production stages helpfully and promptly when asked. The preparation of the manuscript for the press has been made easy and collegial by the copy-editing team of Regina Paleski and Mary Starkey.

Histories of the Bible are products of a particular historical and cultural moment. We write the history of sacred texts once we appreciate that, however sacred we may hold them, they are products of their cultural environment. As human society takes different forms and undergoes new influences, approaches to ancient texts change and develop. No age in the history of Scripture saw more dramatic transformations in attitudes to the Bible than the early modern period in Europe. It has been a privilege – and a challenge both intellectually and spiritually – to observe those transformations through the eyes of my colleagues and fellow-historians.

Erasmus's colloquy Convivium religiosum, composed and published in 1522, gathers together a group of intimate friends for an exquisite lunch in the countryside in midsummer. The scene is a classical locus amoenus; the house is ‘elegant’ but not ‘luxurious’. The garden itself provides all their needs. The wine is du terroir; melons, figs, pears, apples and nuts drop into their laps. We could be in Horace's Sabine farm or Cicero's villa at Tusculum. Erasmus quotes Horace's Epodes, just in case we miss the reference. This is one of half a dozen of the Colloquia which conform to the Classical genre of a Platonic symposium, a feast at which friends share stories and philosophise. ‘The whole Renaissance’, Johan Huizinga reminds us, cherished the wisdom and conversation of friends ‘in the cool shade of a house under trees’. The topic of the convivium, however, is not love or hospitality or folly, but how to read the Bible. The participants all have Greek names suggesting piety or learning (Eusebius, Timothy, Theophilus). A serving boy comes in to say that the meal is spoiling with all their talk; Eusebius, the host, tells him to stay calm. Eusebius says grace via a homily of Chrysostom. But, he continues, there is still no place set for Christ to join in with their feast. He gets the boy to read from the Bible, a passage from Proverbs. Dinner has to wait until Eusebius, followed by three of his companions, offers an exegesis of the verse. Except that, while we are listening to their commentary, it becomes obvious that the feast has already begun, and they do not want for any delicacy, savoury or sweet.

The interpretation of Scripture provides the allegorical narrative as well as the formal subject of Erasmus's fable. None of the companions is a priest or a professional theologian, Erasmus stresses: they are laymen and married; they quote from the ancient Fathers but never from scholastic doctors. The dialogue thus taps into the controversies then raging at the onset of the Reformation about the role of the laity, vernacular translation, and the place of Scripture in everyday devotion.

In the Western Catholic Church of the early sixteenth century, the Bible as a canonical and printed book had little place in worship, but Scripture most certainly did. This is because in worship in every tradition there is always a canon within the canon, or a liturgical canon. Medieval liturgical rites were contained in a series of books, each appropriate for the personnel needed for the performance of a particular rite. The reason for this practice was in part utilitarian, since prior to printing it was impossible to have every text needed for everything in one book. Thus for Mass the celebrant would need a missal, but the cantor would need an antiphoner. Although printing had made it possible to compact the liturgical texts, and to produce smaller tomes, the tradition continued of providing separate books for different purposes. For the Mass, the liturgical Epistles and Gospels were collected in different books, the epistolary and the evangelary. The system of readings can be traced back in the Romano-Frankish tradition as found in the Comes of Murbach, an eighth-century lectionary. Likewise, for the eight Daily Offices a psalter was needed, a hymnal and a Collectar, but also a Legenda for the small portions of Scripture that were to be read at each of the offices. The selection of the readings was in part dictated by the liturgical calendar, the appropriate pericopes being selected for the feast and season. There are certainly examples of early medieval Bibles being marked for liturgical use, but as a distinct lectionary emerged, the lectionary and printed pericopes made it unnecessary for an actual Bible to be used. The non-Roman Western Mass (Gallican, Milanese and Visigothic) had three readings: an Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel; but, from perhaps the sixth century, Rome itself had adopted two readings, an Epistle (sometimes an Old Testament reading survived in place of an Epistle) and Gospel. But the Mass was also punctuated with chants which varied according to the season, and provided a short commentary or elucidation on the main lections. Geoffrey Cuming noted, ‘the Whole system is a model of devotional use of the Bible’.