A RECENTLY published layman's guide to medieval literature by J. A. Burrow, entitled Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100-1500 (Oxford, 1982), seems to me to raise some issues that might profitably engage the attention of biblical scholars. Two questions in particular deserve an airing. The first represents something of a challenge to the traditional kind of historical criticism with which all students of the Old and New Testaments are familiar, and suggests that ideas drawn from the newer 'hterary' approaches to the Bible may turn out to be needed even by those who retain a commitment to the historical-critical method; the second, by contrast, casts some doubt on the more far-reaching claims of these newer approaches and argues for a substantial continued use of historical criticism. I make no attempt to cast a balance at the end between the advantages and drawbacks of the rival camps in contemporary biblical study. I. IS HISTORICAL CRITICISM ANACHRONISTIC? The thinking behind this rather paradoxical question was greatly stimulated by Burrow's work, but I can set it out more easily if I approach the subject obliquely, first making a couple of general observations about hterary criticism in all its branches, and then turning to biblical studies in particular by way of some pregnant suggestions made by Burrow. 1 1. Aesthetic theories, and especially theories of literature, usually exhibit a strange paradox. Almost all attempts to state a general theory of aesthetics are ostensibly intended to cover ah1 kinds of art; but in practice they nearly always take their cue from the art of some particular preferred period or movement, hi the realm of hterary theory this is very easy to illustrate. 'Classical' or 'Romantic' theories of literature appear at face value to be competing statements of the kinds of meaning it is possible for a work of literature—any work—to express. Broadly speaking, a classical approach to aesthetics will find the meaning of a hterary work in the interrelation of its