A Companion to St. Paul in the Middle Ages. Edited by STEVEN R. CARTWRIGHT.

Abstract

Commentators on Scripture in medieval universities commonly cut their teeth on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles. This useful collection of essays asks how Paul became so important an influence in the formation of early Christian doctrine and seeks to trace the process by which views of his authority developed into the Middle Ages and beyond, though, despite its more general title and a dip into Origen, it is concerned mainly with Latin Pauline exegesis in the medieval West. The first section of Part I is concerned with patristic Pauline commentary. Thomas P. Scheck writes on ‘Origen’s interpretation of Romans’, analysing the debates of modern scholarship, and also on ‘Pelagius’s interpretation of Romans’; Joshua Papsdorf grapples with the unresolved puzzle of Ambrosiaster, important as providing ‘the earliest surviving set of commentaries on Paul in Western Christianity’. This section ends with Aaron Canty on ‘St. Paul in Augustine’. Part I then moves to the Middle Ages, beginning with a single though substantial essay on the Carolingians by Ian Christopher Levy. Anne Collins covers eleventh-century commentary and the role of glosses, taking forward the pioneering work of Margaret Gibson on Lanfranc. Steven Cartwright writes on the twelfth century, concentrating on William of St Thierry and Peter Abelard. It would be good to have something on Gilbert of Poitiers, who gets only a few passing mentions, and on others of the twelfth-century commentators who were responsible for setting the new ‘academic’ fashion for commenting on Paul. For the thirteenth century Franklin T. Harkins tackles Aquinas on St Paul and for the later Middle Ages Ian Christopher Levy writes on Nicholas of Lyra and Paul of Burgos.