Comprised of papers presented at a conference held at the University of Liverpool in 2011, this rich and eye-opening collection of essays considers the different ways in which medieval people – religious and lay (mostly men; only one significant woman) – interacted with the text of the Bible as readers and listeners. Most of these case studies are based on northern European sources written between the sixth and the twelfth centuries. After a brief introduction by the editors, the volume begins with an essay by Cornelia Linde, who reminds us that twelfth-century scholars like Hugh of St Victor and Robert of Melun debated the structure, composition and number symbolism of the canon of the Bible long after we presume the matter to have been solved. Influenced by Jerome and Augustine, who organised the Hebrew Scriptures into three thematic parts (though they disagreed about the details), Hugh and Robert attempted to apply the same tripartite principle to the texts of the New Testament (and likewise disagreed). The volume then rewinds to the early Middle Ages. Gerda Heydemann examines Cassiodorus’ exegetical approach to the Psalms in his Expositio psalmorum as a way ‘to convey to his audience a distinctly spiritual perspective on how to react in times of violent conflict and how to deal with potential enemies’ (p. 36). Jinty Nelson introduces us to lay readers of the Bible in the Carolingian period, from Charlemagne and Einhard to Nithard and Dhuoda, whose well-known handbook for her son included hundreds of scriptural citations. Nelson rightly calls this extraordinary woman ‘a phenomenal Bible-reader’ (p. 52). Mayke de Jong considers the deployment of Scripture in Paschasius Radbertus’ Epitaphium Arsenii, a literary rehabilitation of his ill-fated teacher, the abbot Wala, who suffered a series of political misfortunes during the reign of Louis the Pious before dying in voluntary exile in 836. De Jong shows how Radbertus ‘spoke’ in the language of Jeremiah and Job in the Epitaphium through the seamless integration of the vocabulary and idiom of these prophets, when he condemned the political upheaval of the early 830s that led directly to Wala's downfall. Through the agency of authors like Radbertus, the text of the Bible became part of the public discourse about political events in the early Middle Ages.

The second half of the volume presents articles on the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Henry Parkes highlights the tensions between the theory and the practice of biblical readings for the night office through an examination of liturgical manuscripts from eleventh-century Germany. He argues that the readings promoted by these early breviaries were not ‘a literal version of events for the modern historian to account’ (p. 99). Instead, they were largely aspirational of a Roman ideal that even the most well-intentioned and well-equipped monastic communities, like St Gall, could not easily hope to emulate. Florian Hartmann discusses the recourse of Pope Gregory vii and his adversaries to biblical texts in the polemics surrounding the Investiture Controversy. He notes a marked tendency on both sides of the struggle to eschew passages that would require interpretation in favour of texts whose meanings were transparent (like Jeremiah xlviii.10: ‘Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood’ – a favourite of Gregory vii). In this way, papal and imperial polemicists could bolster their criticisms with biblical authority that lay participants could easily understand. Unfortunately, unlike the other contributions to this volume, Hartmann's article favours direct quotations in Latin, relegating some (but not all) translations to the endnotes. Julie Barrau introduces us to a curious set of unpublished twelfth-century exegetical notes written by an English monk or secular clerk concerning a handful Old Testament books (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Daniel and Maccabees). Overlooked by other scholars, these notes display the mind of an educated, idiosyncratic, literal-minded Bible reader, whose interests ranged from magic and the supernatural to architecture and buildings. The volume closes with an essay by Claire Weeda on the topic of violence and political legitimacy among French and German rulers in the twelfth century, both within Christendom and on crusade. Regrettably, this final paper strays from the volume's theme, offering less explicit insight about how the reading of the Bible informed this discourse than other contributions to the book.

Scholars of medieval Christianity and specialists in the reception of the Bible in the Middle Ages will find much food for thought in this volume. The papers range widely over a period of six centuries, offering readers a clear sense of the different contexts in which medieval readers, both religious and lay, encountered the books of the Bible, understood and digested its content, and applied this understanding in the creation of their own texts, from letters and political tracts to liturgical books and scriptural glosses.