Martinus Steyaert and His 235 Rules for Reading Scripture in Seventeenth-Century Louvain

Abstract

In 1693, facing the decline of the Louvain school of biblical scholarship, the Louvain theologian Martinus Steyaert (1647-1701) published a tripartite Latin work on the reading of the Bible, entitled Regulae legendi et intelligendi scripturam sacram (“Rules for Reading and Understanding Sacred Scripture”). Steyaert admitted, however, that the first part of his work was a copy from an old and hardly known book without mentioning its author or the full title. This article demonstrates that Steyaert appealed to the 1546 treatise Regulae intelligendi scripturam sacram (“Rules for Understanding Sacred Scripture”) of the Spanish theologian Francisco Ruiz de Valladolid. The main goals of this contribution is to study the influence of this 16th century work on the reading of the Bible in 17th-century Louvain.