The problem with academics is academia. Too frequently we are so narrow in our focus that we forget that the material we are studying might actually have a wide appeal. An example of this myopia comes in the subtitle of Henderson’s fine study — Commentary in the Age of Erasmus. Almost too perfectly academic — disclosive to the specialist, but not intriguing to even the broader academic audience. And that’s too bad, because scholars in a wide variety of disciplines can benefit from the essays in this volume.
Take for instance the concept of commentary. The great majority of academics would believe they know what a commentary is. But a brief perusal and comparison of Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans and Joseph Fitzmyers’s Romans demonstrates how much diversity exists in the modern signification of the term — even between two commentaries upon the same book. Jean Céard’s article opens the volume and dives into the rich set of ideas that Renaissance authors brought to the idea of a commentary. The article avoids the simple presentation of a typology of commentary styles in order to get at the thought-world of the age of Erasmus.
The next four articles tackle various aspects of Erasmus’s biblical scholarship, and happily all see Erasmus as at least as much of a theologian as a philologist. Jean-François Cottier takes on the character of Erasmus’s Paraphrases, and sees in them not simply an exercise in expansion, but an act “of rewriting to become the ideal instrument of Erasmian pastoral care of the reader”(36). Mark Vessey examines the manner of Erasmus’s interpretation in his Annotations on Luke, and finds a production of an affective mythology that seeks to lead the contemporary reader into the true essence of Christ — the Gospel narrative itself. Riemer Faber analyzes Erasmus’s use of Ambrosiaster in his Annotations on the Galatians, and suggests that this implies a complex interweaving of literary interactions with a host of conversation partners. Robert Sider offers a history of scholarship in taking the reader through some of the choices made in the Toronto edition of the Collected Works of Erasmus on scripture. Taken together these point out the necessity of reading early modern exegesis with, if not through, the lens of Erasmus’s pioneering foundational work.
The next section of three articles turns away from Erasmus to some of his contemporaries. Mark Crane investigates Josse Bade’s commentaries and finds them not to be simplistic pedagogical tools but rather efforts at Christian formation through literacy. Gordon Jensen examines Luther’s translation of Romans 3, to take up the still-relevant question of whether Luther manipulated the scriptures to eisegete Lutheran doctrine, discovering a double defense: first, that Luther sought a German idiom in the word choices; and second, that he followed a theological tradition that stemmed from Aquinas. Hélène Cazes investigates Estienne’s responses to the Paris theologians and finds a brilliant subverting of their texts and promotion of the unique sacred nature of scripture.
The volume ends with a pair of deep philological considerations. Claude La Charité presents a reconstruction of Rabelais’s lost work Stratagemata as a commentary on Frontinus that illustrates some of the characteristics noted by Céard in the first article of the volume. Jeannine de Landtscheer considers what the editing and printing history of Lipisius’s commentaries on Tacitius reveal, and finds not a simple commentary, but an awesome source on the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
While this is an excellent volume, it is not without flaws. It is somewhat stunning that a volume on commentary and philology that presents so well the science of paratextuality and intertextuality would use endnotes, forcing the reader to flip back and forth. I know that presses make choices, but given the opportunities of our own media revolutions, can’t ease of use have a place? That said, this is an excellent volume — an education for the novice and a provocation to further scholarship to the expert.
