An Introduction to the 'Glossa Ordinaria' as Medieval Hypertext

David A Salomon

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780708324943, 9780708324936
• eBook ISBN: 9781783165131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

The Glossa Ordinaria, the medieval glossed Bible first printed in 1480/81, has been a rich source of biblical commentary for centuries. Circulated first in manuscript, the text is the Latin Vulgate Bible of St. Jerome with patristic commentary both in the margins and within the text itself.

1

The Glossing Tradition and the Glossa Ordinaria

1.1 The Problem Stated

As Beryl Smalley writes, ‘The “prehistory” of the Gloss presents many difficulties.’¹ In his Histoire de la Vulgate, Samuel Berger wrote in 1893 ‘L’histoire de cette volumineuse compilation ne peut être écrite aujourd’hui’ (‘The history of this great compilation has yet to be written’).² And more than a century later, and some 800 years since its writing began, we still know precious little about how the text that came to be called the Glossa Ordinaria was compiled. What manuscripts contributed, ultimately, to the first printed edition of 1480/1? What person or persons were responsible for the compilation, if not the writing, of this landmark, magisterial work? We still await a complete history of the manuscript tradition that produced the Glossa Ordinaria, but such a project would require a cadre of dedicated and knowledgeable scholars with wide access to libraries and scriptoria throughout Europe. Because such a history is beyond my scope and limited resources, I have chosen to look at the ‘prehistory’ only cursorily and to focus this study on the first printed edition of the Glossa Ordinaria. Although most scholars agree that the 1480/1 edition may not be entirely faithful to the manuscript tradition it completes, it is this printed edition that gained the Glossa Ordinaria’s widest readership and reception throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages and well into the English Renaissance.

The development of a glossed Bible tradition has been well documented by Christopher De Hamel in his fine work, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade. What follows is largely a summary of De Hamel’s research. Although there is no single source for the Glossa Ordinaria, by 1200 copies of the text were in almost every library in Europe. De Hamel calls the Glossa Ordinaria ‘in effect, the twelfth-century bestseller’.³ The development can be traced from the Laon school, through Gilbert of Poitiers and finally to the printed edition of 1481. In the present study, we will note Gilbert of Poitiers as perhaps the most significant contributor in that he introduced a new design in page layout: the cum textu format which changed the sizes of the text and commentary and assembled them in parallel columns, giving more space on the page to the commentary than to the text, thus stressing the importance of the commentary. A more detailed history of the Glossa Ordinaria itself will be presented in chapter 2.

1.2 ‘Gloss’

The act of glossing texts is as old as reading itself, but the English word ‘gloss’ is relatively new, the earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for the noun gloss being in a 1548 edition of Erasmus’ paraphrases on Matthew. The word’s first appearance as ‘a collection of such explanations, a glossary’ is in Spenser’s 1579 Shepherde’s Calendar, the same text gives us the word’s first use as a verb: ‘to introduce a gloss, comment, or explanations upon a word or passage in a text’. In 1603, Florio’s edition of Montaigne offers ‘Some that studie, plod, and glose their Almanackes’. The English word derives from the Latin ‘glossa’’ and the Greek γλωσσα, meaning tongue or language. Note that any Oxford English Dictionary entry for the word postdates the Middle Ages and the publication of the Glossa Ordinaria in 1481. Lewis and Short note glossa as derived from the Greek and indicating ‘an obsolete or foreign word that requires explanation’.⁴Glossae is ‘a term applied to collections of such words with explanations’. They cite Ausonius as the earliest appearance: ‘Eune, quod uxoris gravidae putria inguina lambis, festinas glossas non natis tradere natis’ (‘Eunus, to the extent that you lick the putrid groin of your pregnant wife, you hasten to bequeath your tongue to your children not (yet) born’).⁵ By the Middle Ages, the Middle English verb glose meant to comment or explain.⁶ The practice of glossing texts dates to the earliest days of both writing and reading. The act of glossing permits the reader to accomplish two things: first, to respond to the text, and second, to engage with the text. In English the word ‘gloss’ does not appear until the mid-sixteenth century. The text is Erasmus’ paraphrases on Matthew 23: ‘Like as by a glosse ye subuerte the commaundement’.⁷ The sense is certainly a negative one. The term ‘glossator’ appears much earlier in one of Wycliffe’s ‘controversial tracts’. Earlier still is the appearance of the noun ‘gloze’, meaning ‘a comment, or marginal note; an exposition’, and appearing in Richard Rolle’s Pricke of Conscience: ‘the glose of the book says always that . . .’ But the word’s Greek and Latin roots run through the Middle Ages back to ancient Greece and Rome. Hugh of St Victor notes that ‘The word “gloss” is Greek, and it means tongue (lingua), because, in a way, it bespeaks {loquitur) the meaning of the word under it.’⁸

It is unclear when the Glossa Ordinaria, the ‘ordinary gloss,’ began to be called as such. The title is no doubt related to the legal glosses so popular throughout the early Middle Ages, ‘Ordinary Gloss’ being a title applied mostly to glosses on law, both secular and canon. Once Roman law was codified by Justinian in the sixth century, a history of glosses of that law followed.⁹ Because the law being glossed was Church canon law,¹⁰ it is no real leap to glossing of the Bible text, and we can generally assume that the writers of the Glossa Ordinaria had the legal glosses in mind. The structure of legal explanations of canon law could easily be applied to discussions and exegesis of ‘the Law’, i.e., the Bible itself. And no less an authority than Augustine himself seems to have encouraged a hermeneutical blending of legalistic strategies in explicating and understanding difficult texts, such as the Bible.¹¹

The functions of the legal glosses, as described by Hermann Kantorowicz, were threefold: ‘to serve as notes for the delivery of oral lecturae; as materials for the composition of systematic text-books (summae); as commentaries for the benefit of future readers of the text’.¹² Although all three functions are seen in the later Glossa Ordinaria, it is the third – commentary for future readers – which seems most applicable. As the biblical glossing tradition advanced, by the mid-twelfth century the biblical gloss served both the glossator and the reader – the intent was both edification and education, as I will discuss later.

What eventually came to be called the glossa ordinaria, or ordinary gloss, on canon law was the result of apparatus written in the twelfth century and first compiled in Bologna in the early thirteenth century by Johannes Teutonicus.¹³ And, in fact, the layout of many of the glossed books of the Bible resembles the legal glosses in form. So, the concept of an ‘ordinary gloss’ is not new to the Bible text – it was actually used much earlier in legal texts – but the Biblia Sacra cum glossa ordinaria was unique in that it applied this glossing tradition, used almost exclusively until that point for secular texts, to the sacred text of the Bible. The effect of such glossing would be far-reaching, extending to Chaucer and even Shakespeare.

1.3 What is a Glossed Text?

The idea of glossing a text is so familiar to the modern reader that examining the nature of a glossed text seems almost absurd, so ingrained is it in our reading and scholarly psyche. What modern reader even thinks twice about underlining passages or writing in the margins of a personal copy of a text, whether a primary source such as a novel or a secondary source such as a scholarly work? The margins of contemporary personal Bibles are consistently littered with comments and notes of the owner, so much so that today many Bibles are printed with enough marginal space (and even notational apparatus, such as page tabulation and thumb indices), inviting the reader to make such marks. So-called ‘reading copies’ of books owned by authors are coveted for what they might tell the scholar about the writer’s reading and, by extension, writing processes. H. J. Jackson’s recent study, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, focuses on books annotated by writers, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Graham Greene, in an effort to help us better understand the writers themselves through study of the books they owned and glossed.¹⁴ In Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, William W. E. Slights looks at marginal notation that was actually printed in texts, and includes an important chapter on the margins of Renaissance English Bibles.¹⁵

College instructors routinely implore students to annotate their own reading copies of books, and such annotations can be telling, reflecting as they may the student’s intellectual development. Study of these annotations might ‘expose basic patterns in readers’ practice’.¹⁶ Reflection on one’s own annotations of texts read earlier in life reveals a type of unintended autobiography. In such ways, then, the study of marginal and interlinear notation can build not only the autobiography of a reader but the autobiography of a text – the history of a given copy of a book.

Because we have now come to understand reading as ‘an intratextual process governed by an active reader’,¹⁷ we need a better framework within which to understand the interrelation of texts and, as I will argue later in the present work, the hypertextual nature of reading itself. Through annotation the reader talks back to the text, but some of the most important glossed texts of the Middle Ages do not necessarily concern the reader talking back to the text as much as they do the reader interacting with the text. In the former the reader engages with the text as either kindred spirit (‘great sentiment here’) or as disputer (‘no! This cannot be right!’). In this guise, the text remains an

organic entity, and the reader, also an organic entity, interacts with the text in order perhaps to produce a third, new, entity. Thus no two glossed texts are identical, dependent as they are on the inclinations, personality and education of the glossator/ reader. That reader may return to the text years later and see an entirely new text in the glossed work (and his prior glosses themselves). Equally, it seems as important to read a work without glossing – by either the reader or another. Some students dislike purchasing used books for that reason. Others rely on their own prior glosses to inform subsequent readings.

With clear implications related to boundaries, it is no surprise to find glossed texts and margins chief concerns of such literary theorists as Jacques Derrida and the theologian/sociologist Michel de Certeau. De Certeau has noted that ‘an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.’¹⁸ Henri Lefebvre as well notes that ‘every society . . . produces a space, its own space,’ and it is certainly possible to suggest that a society of readers, one that was especially exclusionary, did operate until the sixteenth century when literacy (particularly reading) expanded to the wider society.¹⁹

In printed texts, particularly of the late sixteenth century when religious battles were being fought on paper, the margins of texts are most often taken up with material not felt to be appropriate or legally permissible for the main text. Such religious concerns as mysticism had been effectively forced from the medieval text into the margins of the Renaissance text as the result of political, social and theological conflict. Thus the margins of the text became the site of such conflict. The margins of a text are often the sites of battle, and the material in the margins is often lobbying for admittance to the main text. In some cases, it eventually triumphs; in others, it is pushed entirely off the page and, effectively, into or out of cultural memory. Michel de Certeau has written extensively on mystical literature as marginalized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and notes that in such cases ‘the content [i.e., the mystical writing] remained, but it underwent a new treatment [i.e., the presentation].’²⁰

1.4 Why Gloss?

There is a tradition of glossing texts as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans. As the Christian era unfolded, this tradition gravitated towards Scripture, and ‘from at least the Carolingian period it was common practice to make additions in the margins and between the lines of manuscript books of the Bible.’²¹ There has been no comprehensive discussion of glossing, and what we do understand of ancient texts is largely suggestion and intuitive supposition. We know, for example, that early readers and writers glossed texts, particularly those related to Latin grammar, as tools to further the education of the reader. But in a survey of images in illuminated manuscripts of the early Middle Ages, I have been unable to find an illustration of a scribe or student glossing a text.

However, the concept of glossing a text is interwoven with the history of the Bible itself. Because an understanding of the Bible depends on interpretation of the Bible, glossing of the Bible is a practice as old as transmission of the biblical texts themselves. We assume, as modern readers, that the practice of footnoting a text is a given, that footnotes help to illuminate unclear words and passages or to elaborate on what might otherwise be superfluous material. As Anthony Grafton notes, ‘In the eighteenth century, the historical footnote was a high form of literary art.’²² Earlier commentaries, such as those found in the Glossa Ordinaria, ‘eventually came to be seen as integral parts of the texts they explicated. These were regularly taught with their commentaries.’²³

Before footnotes and endnotes,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Glossing Tradition and the Glossa Ordinaria
• 2 History, the Text, and the History of the Text
• 3 Reading, Theory, and Reading Theory
• 4 Reading the Glossa Ordinaria: Genesis 1:1,3:1 and John 1:1
• 5 The Glossa Ordinaria and Hypertext
• Notes
• Bibliography (2013)