Peter Comestor’s Lectures on the Gospel of Luke and its Glosses (c. 1163-8): A Partial Critical Edition and Study

This dissertation studies the Latin biblical lectures of Peter Comestor — a Paris-based scholar who lived and taught in the middle of the twelfth century — through the preparation of a critical edition of his lectures on the Gospel of Luke. Comestor’s corpus of writings formed part of a larger tradition of twelfth-century Latin biblical commentaries that were composed in the cathedral schools of Laon and Paris from roughly 1100 until the University of Paris superseded them around 1215. In recent decades, recognition that the medieval study of the liberal arts and sacred scriptures shared much in terms of didactic approach has led scholarship to revisit a once- common distinction made by modern historians between biblical commentaries and systematic, theological treatises. Emerging research has begun to emphasize the importance of the liberal arts for understanding medieval theology, in whatever literary form, in terms of the generic expectations of classical philology. In order to bolster these efforts to recontextualize the study of the Bible within the broader educational programs of the Latin Middle Ages, I explore Peter Comestor’s lectures on the Gospel of Luke according to one of the informative structures of education that provided continuity across medieval northern France: the methods of literary exposition originally taught in the Roman grammar schools and handed on throughout the Middle Ages in the ‘liberal’ study of the ars grammatica (the art of grammar).My study of Comestor’s Luke lectures, which is enabled by my preliminary work editing the manuscripts containing the writings of Comestor and some of his contemporaries, demonstrates how the lecturers at the cathedral schools of northern France conceived of Christian theology, especially biblical exegesis, as a work of textual criticism. The fact that this scholarly endeavor had as its object the totality of all intelligible reality thus afforded the exegete the right to use the biblical text as an opportunity to teach everything from geometry to canon law. Thus, my research illustrates how liberal arts pedagogies in turn influenced scholars’ conception of Christian theology as sacra pagina (philological exegesis of the Bible) in the decades before the advent of the first European universities.

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