This assessment of Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, considers the social and physical environments in which he flourished and flailed, the intellectual and cultural opportunities he seized, and the religious conflicts in which he was embroiled. In terms of his undergraduate work, the chapter analyses how the essential elements of the Victorian zeitgeist – historicism and scientism – were a felt presence throughout Hopkins’s essays. In terms of his personal life, Hopkins’s homoeroticism is linked to the negative, self-recriminating ‘selving’ articulated in diary entries and poems. Contexts for his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are also explored.

This chapter focuses on unedited and largely unstudied Middle English commentaries on Matthew. In all of these texts, vernacular exegetes turned to Matthew primarily for the book’s moral teaching, and, in line with the arguments advanced in Chapter 1, they favored moralizing glosses without concern for how these interpretations fit into the different senses of Scripture. This chapter begins with consideration of a vernacular commentary likely produced in Durham Priory in the second half of the fourteenth century, almost certainly inspired by the precedent of Rolle. It then takes up the most ambitious work (or collection of works) of English vernacular exegesis, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, tracing their compilers’ changing ways of handling the various components of the vernacular exegetical form – close translation, gloss, and citation. The long and short recensions of their commentary on Matthew are compared at length, and the chapter concludes with a new discussion of Wycliffite interpretive theory in light of these unfortunately neglected texts.

This Introduction provides an overview of the study as a whole. It argues for an understanding of scholastic biblical commentary in fourteenth-century England as a capacious and creative literary form, one which includes works in Latin and Middle English, and which opens biblical exegesis to more demotic devotional uses. In either language, commentators pick their way shrewdly, knowingly, imaginatively, and selectively among the various resources available to them, weighing the authoritative interpretations of earlier writers even as they seek to experiment with their own new ways of reading. The Introduction considers the relevance of this broadly appealing idea of commentary for our understanding of some of the most familiar works of Middle English religious literature, and it ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.

This chapter moves forward to the 1370s, focusing on the massive commentaries on every book of the Bible by John Wyclif, the Oxford master and heretic. Wyclif’s interpretive theories have received substantial attention, but his commentaries (or postils) remain unedited and almost wholly undiscussed, and they are often misleadingly dismissed as early or derivative minor works. In addition to demonstrating Wyclif’s eclectic engagement with earlier exegetical traditions and his apparent interest in using the postils to explore and experiment with his own new interpretations and hermeneutic theories, careful study of the manuscripts of his postils reveals that Wyclif continued to read and revise these works until the very end of his career. Commentary was a crucial mode of writing for Wyclif, and the distinctive tensions in his approach to exegesis are revealed more clearly when his postils are read alongside another unedited and largely unstudied commentary by one of his contemporaries at Oxford, the Franciscan William Woodford. Both Woodford and Wyclif find ways to offer new interpretive material in the face of the seemingly exhaustive precedent of Nicholas of Lyre’s literal postils.

This chapter seeks to intervene in recent discussions of scholastic exegetical theory, arguing that general discussions of scholastic hermeneutics (of the sort found in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, for example) must be read against the widely varying and often inconsistent interpretive priorities and approaches that developed, over the course of centuries, in successive commentaries on individual biblical books. The very idea of a general biblical hermeneutic was relatively uncommon (or at least much more constrained) before the scholastic period, and such general scholastic theories only served to create yet more interpretive-theoretical variegation. The intersection – or, rather, the canny deployment – of such competing theoretical claims is exemplified through sustained readings of three commentaries on the Psalter by English exegetes of the 1310s and 1320s, Thomas Waleys, Nicholas Trevet, and Henry Cossey, all three of which remain unedited and, before now, almost entirely unstudied. Cossey in particular emerges as a shrewd critic of recent developments in interpretive theory.

Chapter 3 considers the development of scholastic exegesis outside the universities, focusing on the Yorkshire hermit-mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349). With only a limited university education, Rolle turned to scholastic commentary, especially on the Psalms, to create material for devotional reading, and he wove authoritative opinions quarried from major scholastic sources together with glosses that read different psalms as describing his distinctive mystical experiences. Rolle wrote two Psalter commentaries reflecting these priorities, first in Latin and then in English, with the later work representing a substantial revision of the earlier one. After assessing the development of his interpretive program across these texts, the influence of Rolle’s vernacular commentary is then charted, focusing on its revision in the last quarter of the century and the various works that imitate its form. Finally, by considering the citations of Rolle’s works by Oxford theologian Richard Ullerston, this chapter reveals the success of Rolle’s hermeneutic project, arguing that the hermit returned to the university with an authority that was at once scholastic and devotional.