The great cultural revolutions of the past have invariably had their victims. Predecessors and earlier approaches were dismissed or deliberately misunderstood, and a new generation of scholars marched boldly into the future with theories which they held to be novel. If they are examined more closely, however, not only can earlier influences be detected, but the scholars who were dismissed can be seen to have had ideas very close to the new ones. The break turns out to be far less radical than it had originally seemed. In Andrew Kraebel's book this certainly appears to have been the case in the early years of the Reformation. Humanists and reformers claimed to have turned their backs on a medieval system of scholastic commentaries on the Bible.

Kraebel's fascinating study concentrates on the biblical interpretations produced in England in the late Middle Ages. The emphasis is on the commentators on the Psalter and the Matthew Gospel of the fourteenth century such as the Franciscan Henry Cossey, the Dominicans Nicholas Trevet and Thomas Waleys, in addition to John Wycliff and Richard Rolle. One of the most striking features of the exercises is the breadth and the variety of the fields which they covered and the scope for originality. They served, Kraebel writes, ‘as a site of intellectual and interpretive creativity and experimentation. Biblical commentary afforded writers an opportunity to try out new ways of reading, to explore the implications of new interpretive theories or the relevance of newly discovered sources, to think in different languages, and to develop ideas about a seemingly endless range of issues, reflecting the broad heterogeneity of the biblical text’. They were seldom tied to a single one of the four standard senses of the Bible – to imagine that they were, according to Kraebel, runs the risk of leading to considerable oversimplifications – and in some cases we find views which foreshadow positions that emerged after the Reformation. Wycliffe, for example, not only believed that it was theoretically possible to interpret the Bible without the help of glosses but, anticipating some later spiritual interpretations on the fringes of Anabaptism, he even suggested ‘that the importance of Scripture qua text is relatively limited’.

Homage, certainly, was paid to the more distinguished commentators of previous centuries – to Peter Lombard, Aquinas, Bonaventure and others, as well as to certain Fathers of the Church, above all Augustine, Cassiodorus and Jerome. The traditions that they established were honoured but treated with marked eclecticism. The commentaries studied by Kraebel reveal a tendency to introduce historical material which was part of a more recent fashion. An example is Livy. In his gloss of Psalm xxiii Waleys brings in the story of Coriolanus taken from Livy and actually presents him as a type of Christ. Then there was a biographical approach: Nicholas Tevet saw the literal sense of the Psalms as describing events that had actually taken place in the life of David. Richard Rolle added another dimension by introducing his own mystical experiences into his commentary on the Psalter.

A further aspect of biblical scholarship in late medieval England which Kraebel discusses is the use of the vernacular by men such as Wycliffe and Rolle both in the translation of biblical texts and in the commentaries. This points to a gradual change in the reading public as it extended beyond the universities to non-scholarly circles whose importance would come into its own with the Reformation. Kraebel's last chapter is mainly concerned with John Bale. Both Bale and Tyndale believed that it was possible for the faithful to understand the Bible without the assistance of commentaries. Tyndale, writes Kraebel, ‘derided scholastic commentaries for their various conflicting interpretations, taking these disagreements to be a sure sign of error’. Nevertheless Tyndale and Bale both produced commentaries of their own which were heavily indebted to their medieval predecessors. Kraebel examines Bale's comments on the Apocalypse, written in the vernacular and based on Tyndale's vernacular translation, in which he surveys the patristic exegetes up to the seventh century and then moves on to list later scholastic interpreters before Luther. How could such an approach be reconciled with Bale's dismissal of the medieval exegetical tradition? According to Kraebel the references to earlier commentators were intended as little more than a bibliographical indication. ‘The marginal references to these other commentaries would, then, be citations of a sort, but ones that recommend further reading rather than seek to lend authority to Bale's interpretations which are necessarily correct insofar as he, like Tyndale, “hathe the profession of baptyme wryten in his harte”.’

This is a highly rewarding book. Kraebel deals with a complex subject with the utmost clarity and competence. Previously the most authoritative studies of the matter were by Beryl Smalley. These are fully acknowledged, but Kraebel does not always agree with them. He has added important insights and conclusions of his own which enrich our understanding of a field far broader and more interesting than the reformers would admit.