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.

Medieval historiography in Britain was written in all of the languages of the island. Latin and vernacular texts engaged in sophisticated intertextual dialogues throughout the period. This essay considers how vernacular history writing deployed its vernacularity to make political and imaginative interventions in the dominant traditions of historiography. The essay surveys how the Middle English chronicles of Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng, and the Short Chronicle, and the Anglo-Norman chronicles of Piers Langtoft and Nicholas Trevet engaged with ideas of intertextuality, authority, citation, and translation in order to craft narratives of insular history often at odds with each other.