Chapter 2 - Eclectic Hermeneutics: Biblical Commentary in Wyclif’s Oxford

Summary

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.