In spite of the obvious importance of the scholastic thinkers of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Paris, Peter Comestor and his great work of biblical interpretation, the Historia scholastica, remain relatively understudied. Mark Clark brings this important work of early scholasticism into focus with a discussion of the text in its intellectual and theological context, emphasizing its witness to the increasing importance of the historical understanding of scripture from the Victorines through Peter Lombard into the traditions of exegesis in late medieval schools. The book concludes with eight textual appendices that give new critical editions of the prefaces and opening chapters of Comestor's Historia scholastica on Genesis and Luke, and of the prefaces and opening chapters of three versions of the classroom lectures on the same portions of the Historia by Comestor's star pupil, Stephen Langton. Clark's central argument is that the Historia scholastica can only be fully understood in the context of its reception in the schools of medieval Paris, especially in the classroom of Stephen Langton, who dominated the world of biblical interpretation in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. The argument is solidly based on the manuscript evidence for Langton's original lecture course on the Historia in the early 1170s, and his revised versions of the course later in that century.

This philosophy of a critical edition privileges the reception of the Historia scholastica in its use in the medieval schools, arguing that the classroom notes of Langton and his pupils are a more accurate version of the Historia scholastica than even the earlier manuscript tradition attributed directly to Peter Comestor. By this choice, Clark rejects a common editorial assumption that a more “primitive” manuscript tradition must be closer to the author's text—the approach of the 2004 Corpus Christianorum edition of the Historia scholastica on Genesis edited by Agneta Sylwan which was produced from a staggering number of pre-1200 manuscripts (Petris Comestoris Scolastica Historia: Liber Genesis [Brepols])—opting instead to recognize the surviving testimony of the received text of Langton's courses on the Historia as being closer to Comestor's original intention (260–263).

The striking advantage of Clark's edition is its analysis of a version of Comestor's work that was actually read in the Middle Ages, in contrast to previous analysis of an edition of the text that does not exist in any one medieval manuscript, and may never have existed. Clark's version of the Historia scholastica emphasizes an encyclopedic presentation of the historical reading of scripture and adds to scholarship on the literal sense of the Bible in the medieval schools tracing all the way back to the work of Beryl Smalley in the middle of the twentieth century. Clark praises Comestor's Bible for its cogency, for reducing “an enormous amount of material,” from earlier commentaries, the Glossa ordinaria, and extra-biblical literature, “producing a narrative at once concise, polished, and pleasing” (93). In this sense, the Historia was a much better introductory biblical textbook than the massive and unsystematic Gloss (85).

Clark's edition thus gives excellent clues for a critical edition of the Historia scholastica, but it does not resolve the problem of the lack of a reliable edition for future scholarship, since it gives us only a partial text of this great work. Of course, the same can be said for Sylwan's edition, but hers appeared in a major text series, whereas Clark's, as appendices to a scholarly monograph, will not be as readily available. Since one of Clarks points is that the Historia scholastica has been ignored in part because there is no reliable critical edition, it is to be hoped that his edition, or an edition based on his insights, will be made more widely available to scholars.

Clark's argument is tightly developed, beginning with a meditation on the (as he entitles chapter 1) “formerly famous but long since forgotten” Historia Scholastica, then showing how Comestor's classroom lectures on the Glossa ordinaria led to the Historia scholastica, which then became the standard biblical textbook of the 1160s, culminating in a description of the “Langton Edition” of the Historia, which in turn became the magisterial textbook of the late medieval Bible. In his conclusion, Clark makes a strong case for further study of the reception of the Langton Edition of the Historia, especially in late medieval Mendicant houses of study. Since this path encounters every voice of biblical scholarship from Hugh of Saint Victor to the fourteenth century, Clark's book gives us a broad overview, as well as excellent detailed insights, into the scholastic classroom. It also provides an original version of both the development of the literal sense of scripture (a twofold sense, consisting of “the primary, literal sense of Scripture, and the narrative itself,” [109]) and the reception of the Glossa ordinaria in the medieval schools.

And yet, for all this erudition, there are some places where Clark labors mightily to prove things that are already well-known. For example, in a close reading of Comestor's lectures on the pregnancy of Elizabeth at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, he goes to some length to show that Comestor and his students had a version of the Great Gloss to Luke in front of them (55–57), and that Comestor reordered the Gloss material for his students in a way that “suggests that some version of the pecia system was already in place by the 1160s” (65). This is hardly surprising, since Christopher de Hamel showed over thirty years ago that pecia of the Glossa ordinaria were available for sale in Parisian bookshops by the 1140s (Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Book Trade [D. S. Brewer, 1984]). It would have been more surprising to find that Comestor and his students did not have this text in front of them.