ABSTRACT
Several years ago, I expanded my study of the manuscript transmission of Carolingian Bible commentaries into the early modern era. In my search for early imprints of ninth-century biblical exegetes, I was quickly struck by the fact that more than half of the relevant sixteenth-century imprints fell during the relatively brief period from 1527 to 1540.1 Clearly, some external factors were responsible for this revival in print of the Carolingian achievement in biblical studies. In searching for the cause for this revival, I found that tracing the trajectory of the Carolingian Bible commentaries in the sixteenth century also illuminated the influence of medieval biblical studies as a whole on the early modern intellectual world and the issue of modernization.
