The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

Scholars have often characterized John Gower as a moralizing and even severe poet, one for whom obedience to normative law is the sole ethical standard. I suggest that this is only half of the picture. On the one hand, Gower certainly relies on prescriptive forms, such as the exemplum, distinctio, and the microcosm, to make the ethical lessons of his poetry legible to the reader. But on the other, he also draws the reader’s attention to moments in his poetry when a strict obedience to normative forms of ethics leads his characters into moral error. Gower does this by staging for his reader moments in which these characters cry out to various figures of power, begging those figures to suspend ethical norms in the name of mercy and pity. I argue that, in his three long poems—the Mirour de l’omme, the Vox Clamantis, and especially the Confessio Amantis—this “crying voice” casts light upon Gowers views of ethics and poetics alike, by stressing at once the flexibility of Gowers moral views and his commitment to listening, if only in conceit, for the voices that are latent in the matter he reworks.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

This chapter focuses on recent scholarly discussion of how the visual arts may be considered capable of “visual exegesis” (a term first coined by the art historian Paolo Berdini and now widely used). It argues that, when we read the Bible in the company of visual art, we are asked to countenance our implication in each other, in a single world full of many meanings, in the shared conditions that sustain human communication across difference and in the encompassing existential questions that the biblical texts pose.

The second chapter engages an area that should not exist, according to the traditional historiography. If Calvin, as a good evangelical reformer, avoided all entanglements with the tradition by maintaining his sole focus on the scriptures, a chapter that considers tradition and exegesis should be impossible. But the evidence demonstrates that is far from the case. In examinations of Calvin’s Commentaries on Romans and II Corinthians, and his Lectures on Genesis and Daniel, the readers will see an extraordinary array of considerations of the orthodox exegetical traditions. Further, evidence is presented to show moments when Calvin turned away from the plain sense of scripture in order to pursue the “fuller sense” that would allow him to provide the stronger doctrinal teaching – even at the cost of less-strict maintenance of the doctrine of the scriptures. This was carried out across his considerations of both testaments, and in both the earlier and later stages of his career.

The Introduction sets the book its principal task: presenting a reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that establishes that one of its primary aims is to complete Kant’s account of the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature. This task is the main concern of the Critique of the Aesthetics Power of Judgment and the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. It further specifies the methodological commitment to offering a unified reading of the book as a whole, based on close exegesis.

This chapter explores twelfth-century readings of the book of Ruth, seemingly a short pastoral story. The limited scale and scope of the book is particularly revealing of the careful ingenuity and engaged earnestness with which clerics and monks approached scripture, a fact that may be obvious but is often obfuscated by the apparent repetitions from exegete to exegete, the deep unfamiliarity to a modern eye of the intellectual tools and methods they used and the sheer textual mass of medieval exegesis. There is still a lot that historians can learn from reading those texts. In the book of Ruth, the fluid identities of the two female protagonists and their eventful lives, alongside the clear figure of a Boaz-Christ that elevated the theological status of the whole book, were scrutinised, assimilated and reinvented by twelfth-century clerics, monks and masters who had their own identities, life trajectories and zeitgeist to imagine and to shape through their words.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

The modalities – necessity, possibility, and impossibility – are not topics like the existence of God, creation versus eternity, prophecy, divine attributes, or providence whose “secrets” Maimonides investigates in the Guide. They belong instead to the philosophical and logical framework within which these topics are explored. But they are no less perplexing. The modal terms often differ in meaning in different contexts, depending on whether the subject is physics or metaphysics, and for the falasifa and the mutakallimun. Therefore, in order to address any of the central controversies of the Guide, we must first sort out these modal notions, distinguishing the different conceptions in different contexts.

In delineating the causes or reasons for a thing’s being, Aristotle notes, “what something is and what it is for are one …” (Aristotle 1984, 198a25–6). The nature and structure of a thing and its purpose coincide. The nature and structure of a table is what it is for. The nature and structure of the heart is no different than its purpose, to pump blood. And so it is, as I shall argue, with Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190). The structure of the work is intimately related to its purpose and ultimate goal. That there is an overall structure needs to be unpacked, and that the structure, overall and even within its discrete parts, serves a particular end also needs to be clarified. If this programmatic essay succeeds, it will provide a framework for reading the essays that follow. Each essay may be read as offering insight to the specific issue at hand, but also may be read as, in its own way, aiming at the ultimate purpose of the work as a whole.

The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was extensive; it began in antiquity with Aspasius’ commentaries on selected books of the EN and reached a stage of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the works of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which served primarily educational purposes. The use of Aristotle’s ethics in the classroom continued in the late Byzantine period as well, but until recently scholastic use of the EN was known mostly through George Pachymeres’ compendium of Book 11 of his Philosophia. I am currently editing the last surviving exegetical commentary on the EN in the strict sense of the term, also penned by George Pachymeres, which represents a new witness to the resurgence of Aristotelian studies in late Byzantium. It also improves our knowledge of Pachymeres’ role as a teacher in the context of higher education, and of the use of ethics as a practical discipline. The discussion also takes into account the religious underpinnings of Pachymeres’ moralism, pointing to the way pagan ethics in late Byzantium are rendered relevant to their Christian readership.

This chapter focuses on Proclus’ use of a theological notion of harmony, which is designed to reveal the essence, intelligible relations, and causality of the soul by taking its harmonic structure as a starting point. The fact that the soul is made of specific means and proportions paves the way to the claim that the soul’s essence consists of a logos. This represents neither just an exegetical remark related to Plato’s divisio animae nor the mere use of an image: Proclus regards Plato’s account of the soul’s harmonic structure as a specific key to access theology. By analysing the harmonic component within Proclus’ iconic theology, a clear analysis of both the “theological” implications of Proclus’ study of the harmonic structure of the Platonic world-soul and of the metaphysical-theological function of the ambivalent notion of logos emerges.

This chapter examines modern Kabbalah’s autonomous yet continuous relationship with premodern Kabbalah. Its autonomy is attributed to various external factors such as new technologies, geopolitical and ideological shifts, vernacular developments and dramatic historical events. These factors are evident in the self-consciousness of modern kabbalists and reflected in a shift toward larger fraternal groups, as well as increasingly disseminated personal, exoteric styles of writing. The continuity is presented through a synopsis of medieval Kabbalah, which addresses a few continuous themes: exegesis, which includes a discussion of the commitment to certain sacral texts as well as its theosophy (primarily the sefirotic system), theurgy, gender and magic (albeit with some reservation). This synopsis concludes with a comparative reflection addressing medieval Kabbalah’s relationship to Christianity and Islam. The author closes by stressing that modern kabbalists inherited not a doctrine but a series of complexities and debates, which, fueled by the dynamic processes of modernity, accounts for the richness and vastness that is modern Kabbalah.