Through an analysis of his Pauline exegesis in the 390s, especially Romans 7, Chapter 2 demonstrates that Augustine develops a consistent interpretation of Paul on justification: faith justifies because it trusts God to give the grace of charity to fulfill the law by the Holy Spirit in baptism. The chapter situates this interpretation within the predominantly baptismal theology of justification in Ambrose and North Africa. This context unlocks how Augustine’s account of faith justifying by obtaining grace is intended to interpret the catechumen’s reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism; in Augustine’s own analogy, faith is the conception of grace, and baptism is its birth. Turning to ad Simplicianum (To Simplician), Augustine’s changed view on election preserves this interpretation of justification by faith. The chapter concludes by applying Augustine’s interpretation of Paul to his conversion in confessiones (Confessions), though this also reveals Augustine’s need to explain why faith sometimes fails to obtain grace.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Haoran Tong centers on the evolution of Chinese dictionary-making that reflects a rich sociocultural and political tradition that spans millennia. Dictionaries translate the historical into the present, the frontier into the inland. The refinement of character dictionaries such as Erya and Shuowen jiezi facilitated the writing system’s revolutions. The emergence of bilingual dictionaries documented the transformation of Chinese phonetic notations. From exegesis of Confucian classics to compilations of ethnic dialects, institutional dictionary-making by the literati class remains an immutable symbol of the power to normalize, standardize, and harmonize. The divergence of definitions, notations, and arrangements of words across various dictionaries mirrors a proliferation of ideas on the future of the Chinese language and the Chineseness it embodies.

This chapter offers an overview of the fascinating and complex world of Islamic Christology by using the Qur’an and Hadith, the primary sources of Islam, as a starting point. It condenses the wealth of literature that Muslim exegetes, philosophers, and mystics have produced on the Islamic representation of Jesus and Mary, examining what they consider to be authoritative Islamicized forms of Christian beliefs.

Inspired by his Old Testament exegesis, Diodore of Tarsus composed a chronicle, which corrected the chronology proposed by Eusebius.

This chapter examines Augustine’s sermons given on the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost. The homilies given on the Ascension highlight Augustine’s Christology, particularly the Ascension as disclosing Christ’s presence and the totus Christus. Augustine’s sermons on Pentecost and its vigil emphasize the unity of the church, imaged in the speaking of tongues in Acts 2, through the giving of the Holy Spirit. The sermons on Pentecost also unpack, through the image of the new wine and drunkenness in Acts 2, the newness and continuity of Pentecost as the fulfillment of the law in the Spirit’s gift of charity.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

Scholars have often characterized John Gower as a moralizing and even severe poet, one for whom obedience to normative law is the sole ethical standard. I suggest that this is only half of the picture. On the one hand, Gower certainly relies on prescriptive forms, such as the exemplum, distinctio, and the microcosm, to make the ethical lessons of his poetry legible to the reader. But on the other, he also draws the reader’s attention to moments in his poetry when a strict obedience to normative forms of ethics leads his characters into moral error. Gower does this by staging for his reader moments in which these characters cry out to various figures of power, begging those figures to suspend ethical norms in the name of mercy and pity. I argue that, in his three long poems—the Mirour de l’omme, the Vox Clamantis, and especially the Confessio Amantis—this “crying voice” casts light upon Gowers views of ethics and poetics alike, by stressing at once the flexibility of Gowers moral views and his commitment to listening, if only in conceit, for the voices that are latent in the matter he reworks.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

This chapter focuses on recent scholarly discussion of how the visual arts may be considered capable of “visual exegesis” (a term first coined by the art historian Paolo Berdini and now widely used). It argues that, when we read the Bible in the company of visual art, we are asked to countenance our implication in each other, in a single world full of many meanings, in the shared conditions that sustain human communication across difference and in the encompassing existential questions that the biblical texts pose.