Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History illustrates the way this academic discursive tradition was invented and blossomed. If any text is to be judged by the weightiness and usefulness of footnotes, as Grafton suggested, then Ocker's book is a sure winner. In Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation, Ocker chronicles with exemplary scholarly depth, linguistic competence and erudite yet not pedantic prose the key shift in biblical hermeneutic, rhetoric and theology in the late Middle Ages. He has amassed an astonishing database of medieval commentaries, postillas, and unpublished – and hitherto relatively under-utilised – manuscripts to prove convincingly and buttress his main thesis that the transition from an adherence to a distinction between literal and spiritual senses of scripture occurring in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries prefigured what was to follow in the sixteenth century protestant Reformation, and that the development in exegetical and theological work during these two centuries cannot be regarded as an insignificant blot or a period of regression.

Adapting Denys Turner's Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (1995) and Yves Delègue's Les machines du sense: fragments d'une sémiologie médiévale (1987), Ocker argues that a new attitude towards biblical textuality gave rise to an ethos of interpretation in which ‘to distinguish spiritual from literal’ became increasingly more difficult, thanks to the exegetical work of Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra, among numerous others (p. 7).

In chapter 1, Ocker presents a survey of medieval exegetical and theological literature and fundamental principles of medieval hermeneutics and epistemology. Ocker discusses a further theoretical consolidation of the allegorical interpretative tradition by looking at Richard of St Victor, who emphasised the superiority of signification of biblical figures vis-à-vis secular non-philosophical literature. Moreover, by highlighting certain exegetical perspectives in the commentaries of, inter alia, Pierre Auriol, Nicolau Eimeric and Heinrich of Langenstein, Ocker shows the variegated hermeneutical strategies of categorising not only between the Old and the New Testaments but also other often ingenious ways of dividing up the narratives of scripture, for at ‘the core of this view of the Bible's organization lies a conviction that biblical literature and its history are arranged to facilitate spiritual progress’ (p. 27).

Chapters 2–4 form the core of the book, wherein Ocker convincingly demonstrates the nuanced exegetical and hermeneutical shift within this period. The issue of signification, of verbal and natural, receives an extensive discussion in the second chapter. The Victorine hermeneutical maxim – ‘Not only words, but things also are representational’ (p. 31) – becomes more contested in the late medieval shift in theories of signification. By citing Nicholas Gorran's exposition of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Ocker shows how this shift within the medieval exegetical tradition occurred, so that if ‘biblical authors tinkered with language to make it suit the mystery it should convey’ then ‘mystical meaning belongs to the literal, not the spiritual sense’ (p. 48). This, according to Ocker, is the very key shift, locating the site of meaning within the text, and that within the literal which embeds the spiritual meaning as well.

Chapter 3 deals extensively with the shift within the late medieval understanding of biblical rhetoric, including the issue of biblical image and the role of figurative exegesis. For Ocker, the hitherto relatively clearly distinct spheres of literal and spiritual became more blurred as more exegetes began to share the ideal that the letter of the scriptural text, qua letter and qua text, possessed the intrinsic ability, divinely invested, to ‘excite, to cause insight, and to overwhelm the reader with truth’ (p. 78). By discussing Hermann of Schildesche's Compend on the Meanings of Sacred Scripture, one gains helpful insights on medieval attitudes towards figurative exegesis. Both the historical and the non-historical have been ‘figurated’ to include the ‘tropical, parabolic, symbolic and poetic’ senses (p. 97).

The chapter on divine speech is perhaps the most forcefully – and effectively – argued section of the book. He discusses six important topoi of looking at the role of scripture as divine speech-act: ‘simplicity’, ‘causality’, ‘double-literal and parabolic meaning’, ‘inspiration’, ‘logic’ and ‘history’. When Ocker discussed the issue of ‘causality’, he shows how the reappropriation of the Aristotelian four-causes became an effective heuristic in understanding the authorship of scripture. The ‘grace of God’, ‘the apostle’ or Peter's request for inscripturation could all serve as the efficient cause of the Gospel of Mark, according to Hugh of St Cher (p. 130). In the section on ‘inspiration’, Ocker shows that John Duns Scotus and Alexander of Hales saw inspiration as more of the subjective condition rather than, as the sixteenth century Reformers would contravene, with a heavy emphasis on the objective work of the Holy Spirit as the inspirer. The nuanced interpretative ingenuity of Ocker emerges when he shows that this reliance on the objective aspect of inspiration of the biblical authors was already presaged in the writings Hugh of St Cher and Aquinas, who saw inspiration as ‘gratis data’ regardless of the pre-condition of the recipient (p. 159).

Perhaps the most significant contribution for the readers of this journal would be the way Ocker's conclusion leads one to see the transition from the late medieval era to the Reformation era as one of continuity of hermeneutical and theological method rather than a rupture. In that regard, Ocker's perspective echoes those of Heiko Oberman, David Steinmetz and more recently Richard Muller, who have emphasised the commonality of habits of thought and shared scholastic method and theological trajectory. Ocker does so in chapter 5 by treating how ‘dialectic’, ‘rhetoric’ or ‘divine speech’ was understood by the Reformers whose learning in Renaissance humanism was the linkage between the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century exegetical tradition and the putative ‘dawn’ of a completely new era of biblical interpretation.

After the conclusion, Ocker makes a yet further scholarly contribution in the appendix, in which hitherto untranslated and unpublished commentaries of Nicholas Gorran, Jacques Fournier and Hermann of Schildesche are reproduced. Although the book is not an easy read, the patient reader will be amply rewarded by walking into this ‘garden of (academic) pleasure’, as Wolfgang Musculus has spoken of the reader's foray into the Bible.