2 results
7 - Disentangling Heretics, Jews, and Muslims: Imagining Infidels in Late Medieval Pastoral Manuals
-
- By Deeana Copeland Klepper, Associate Professor of Religion and History at Boston University.
- Edited by Michael D. Bailey, Sean L. Field
-
- Book:
- Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 19 October 2018, pp 137-156
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
We discussed above concerning Jews and pagans [Saracens], who dishonor God through infidelity. Now we wish to discuss heretics, who, by deviating from the faith, sin against God in many ways.
Raymond of Penyafort, Summa de casibus de poenitentia (c. 1224)We have heard about Jews and Saracens who, through infidelity, and obduracy, and depraved understanding or blindness, do not recognize the Lord, but blaspheme and dishonor him; now we will deal with heretics, who, apostatizing from faith, are seen to sin against God in many ways.
Hostiensis, Summa aurea (c. 1253)Indeed in sins you [heretics] surpass all, having been made more perfidious than Jews and crueler than pagans.
Innocent III, Si adversus nos terra consurgeret (1205)As the epigraphs above illustrate, it was a commonplace in late medieval texts to describe the depth of a heretic's depravity by relationship to that of Jews, Muslims, or pagans, and the language used to do this seems to have intensified during the first half of the thirteenth century. R. I. Moore's The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987) notably made the case that new efforts to identify heretics, Jews, and other ‘marginalized’ groups of people as threats to Christian society in the twelfth century served an important social function in the construction of a new Christian body politic. In the decades since its publication, scholars have pushed back against some aspects of Moore's structuralist reading of the rise of inquisition and isolation of ‘outsiders’, but the notion that the twelfth century saw a new and fundamental linkage between Jews, heretics, Muslims, and other so-called marginal groups remains strong. Recent surveys of medieval heresy by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Christine Caldwell Ames represent the state of the field well, and both embrace the notion that medieval Christians understood various categories of person to be members of a broadly construed group of ‘the infidel’.
There is good reason for the wide acceptance of this framework; the language of canon law texts and commentaries, theological treatises, and judicial and political policies all provide plentiful support for it.
17 - Theories of interpretation: The quadriga and its successors
- from PART III - PROCESSING THE BIBLE: COMMENTARY, CATECHESIS, LITURGY
-
- By Deeana Copeland Klepper, Boston University
- Edited by Euan Cameron, Union Theological Seminary, New York
-
- Book:
- The New Cambridge History of the Bible
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 01 September 2016, pp 418-438
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Early modern biblical interpretation was fundamentally shaped by the intertwined movements of humanism and Reformation, and common understanding of ancient and medieval Christian biblical interpretation has been shaped by those movements as well. According to the resulting narrative, biblical interpretation in the sixteenth century broke emphatically with medieval traditions, abandoning the fancy of allegory and the scholastic ‘fourfold sense of Scripture’ for a more rational and even ‘scientific’ emphasis on the plain sense of the text. Certainly many early modern interpreters claimed such a break, and often disparaged medieval exegetical traditions. But early modern biblical exegesis owed a great deal to the medieval tradition that preceded it. Humanists and Reformation thinkers may have viewed themselves as transcending a moribund scholastic tradition, but they nevertheless used medieval scholarship as a starting point for their own reading of the Bible. The most distinctive aspects of early modern exegesis – an emphasis on the literal sense of Scripture and a careful attention to original biblical languages – had a basis in medieval Bible scholarship. A particularly important resource for early modern scholars was Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270–1349), whose Postilla litteralis super bibliam emphasised the literal sense of Scripture and the importance of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition in discerning it. Although later exegetes approached the Bible with a different sensibility, their very concept of literal reading was part of the legacy of ancient and medieval biblical scholarship.
Early modern Christian exegetes were heirs to a complicated hermeneutical tradition developed over the course of centuries and ostensibly based on a fourfold division of meaning. The fourfold sense of Scripture, a product of the early church, was based in the first instance on a twofold division between the literal (sometimes also called historical) sense and the spiritual sense, as expressed, for example, in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians and in the writing of the Greek exegete Origen (c. 184–254). Early on, exegetes began to draw additional distinctions within the spiritual sense, constructing threefold or fourfold hermeneutical schemes. Origen elaborated a threefold understanding of Scripture, distinguishing between literal, allegorical and moral senses, and Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) famously followed this model.
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)