Eyal Poleg's book begins from an uncontroversial standpoint: ‘Devoid of close contact with the biblical text, the majority of men and women [in the Middle Ages] experienced the Bible through a carefully structured array of rituals and images, sermons and chants’ (p. 1). Seeking to go beyond such truisms, he focuses upon four channels of biblical mediation in England (an important centre of Bible studies and production) during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, between the intellectual revolution of the twelfth century and the beginnings of the vernacular Bible.

Chapter i takes the example of Palm Sunday processions to study the relationship between the liturgy and the Bible. What strikes one is the complexity of that relationship. While Palm Sunday was in some sense a re-enactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, the processions expanded significantly upon the Gospel account. Though the entry through Jerusalem's city gate was comparatively unimportant in the text it became a major event in liturgical re-enactment and this in turn affected how the Gospels were illustrated, with the biblical scene being depicted in the manner of the familiar liturgy. For participants in the Palm Sunday processions, differentiating the strictly biblical from the strictly liturgical proved impossible, especially as the liturgy was deliberately ‘quasi-biblical’ in its language, ‘making the liturgy an extension of the Bible rather than a separate entity’ (p. 32).

The Bible for the medieval man or woman must therefore be carefully differentiated from the bare biblical text, a point further highlighted in chapter ii, which studies the talismanic use of Gospel books. Liturgical works often afford the textus a central role in the mass – not, Poleg argues, the text of the Gospels but the physical Gospel book itself, used in ritual and richly bound. An inventory from Canterbury Cathedral actually mentions textus sine libro, revealing that bindings could be important objects even without containing any actual book. This agrees with the evidence of oath-taking on Gospel books examined in the second half of the chapter. In the court of law, as in church, the Gospel book's sacred qualities derived not from the completeness or accuracy of its text but from its age, size, binding (‘such books were judged primarily by their covers’: p. 91), associations and correct ritual use.

From the external appearance of the Bible, Poleg moves to its internal formatting and structure, its ‘paratext’, in chapter iii. He studies a randomly chosen fifty-six biblical manuscripts from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England and France, all of the type that he describes as the ‘late medieval bible’ – the standardised form of pandect which came to dominate the production of biblical manuscripts from the end of the twelfth century. While the ‘late medieval Bible’ had its origins in the glossed Bible of the scholastic classroom, Poleg believes that it developed primarily as a preaching aid for the friars, intended for reference rather than for reading; hence the development of chapter divisions to aid the location of particular texts and the minuscule size of some of the surviving pandects. Poleg sees this as part of a move away from seeing the Bible as a narrative and towards seeing it as a text, a move particularly noticeable in the new forms of preaching which became popular in this period. Rather than the homiletic style of preaching which interpreted a scriptural pericope line by line, from the twelfth century sermons started to focus simply on a single thema from the pericope, analysed via a potentially complex series of divisions and subdivisions. Chapter iv engages with the role of biblical mediation within this new preaching, focusing in particular on three Advent Sunday sermons. This chapter emphasises the novelty of late medieval preaching – indeed frequently over-emphasises it. For preachers ‘the entire Bible was regarded as a pool of words and sentences’ (p. 188) which could be connected to construct an interpretation regardless of narrative coherence – but this had been the case for centuries, the capacious memory of the early medieval monk proving as useful as later concordances. Poleg interprets the popularity of a version of the Interpretation of Hebrew names (an etymological glossary) which provided multiple possible meanings for each word as evidence for the friars' need to creatively accommodate Scripture to their message. But Christian exegesis had long acknowledged that the potential meaning of any part of Scripture was infinite and that preachers could choose from multiple acceptable interpretations. Late medieval preachers certainly innovated, but while working in continuity with the previous millennium of Christian Latin interpreters.

Poleg ends with a strong argument for the importance of studying scriptural mediation. Interest in the pure biblical text misses the fact that the Bible was experienced in different ways through a diversity of channels. Furthermore, while Poleg frequently emphasises how biblical mediation could reinforce social hierarchies, he rejects the Reformers' image of a medieval laity denied access to the Bible. Mediation provided all groups in society, lay and clerical both, with an approach to the Bible, though the understanding of what the Bible was differed for different groups.

Manchester University Press has produced a handsome and sturdy volume; it is therefore a pity that quite so many typos have made it into the final text of this rich and interesting study.