ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on three main areas in which genres of biblical interpretation were developed and espoused throughout the Middle Ages: Learning and Teaching Through Scripture, The Changing Roles of Scripture, and Scripture and the World. Throughout the period from the transformation of the Roman Empire, a process of immediate and long-term change, to the eve of the sixteenth-century Reformation, scriptural interpretation underwent considerable change. The period covered in the book takes a sweep from the Mediterranean culture of the later Roman Empire, the flourishing and decline of Late Antiquity through western traditions of interaction between barbarian and Christian cultures of various sorts, notably Irish, Germanic, to the ostensibly more settled period of the High and later Middle Ages, of glossed bibles and commentary, and of the invention of scholastic method.
