4 - World History and Biblical History: Exegesis and Encyclopaedic Writing

Summary

Universal history and encyclopaedic writing were closely bound up in the Middle Ages with biblical exegesis. In his De doctrina christiana, Augustine recommended history as an aid to biblical interpretation, since everything that has been done belongs ‘to the history of time, whose creator and controller is God’. He linked the six days of Creation to the six Ages of the World, giving it an organic unity, and this scheme was taken up and disseminated by Isidore of Seville and Bede the Venerable. Likewise, Jerome, who translated Eusebius’s world chronicle into Latin, proposed on the basis of a reading of Daniel that world history could be divided into four universal monarchies, the last of which was that of Rome. In both these cases, the Bible provided a model for the schematisation of world history. The patristic interest in finding principles of unity and coherence in historical events was strengthened by Hugh of St Victor’s development of a theology of history that embraced a sense of movement and process; his Chronicon, written for students of theology in Paris, includes historical and geographical information relevant not just to the Bible, but to classics like Sallust and Lucan, which were read in the cathedral schools. Comestor’s Historia scholastica, through its inclusion of non-biblical ‘incidentiae’, opened the way for the harmonisation of secular and sacred history and sparked off a number of universal histories in the vernacular, as discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 62). Likewise, Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopaedic Speculum maius follows the order of Scripture as its unifying principle: the Speculum Naturale is concerned with Creation and the meaning of things, the Speculum doctrinale with the moral consequences of the Fall, and the Speculum historiale with human history. As Franklin-Brown has shown, its main aim was to aid in the ‘spiritual interpretation of Scripture’, completing the imagined project laid out by Augustine in his De doctrina christiana: it adheres to ‘an Augustinian model in which the writing of encyclopaedias was connected to the study of Scripture’. In this chapter, I examine how universal histories and other encyclopaedic works in Old Norse-Icelandic make use of Old Testament material. In particular, I want to tease out how authors select biblical stories, and how they negotiate the relationship between history and allegory.