Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture

Henri de Lubac was a Catholic theologian, and this is the English translation, published by Eerdmans and T&T Clark, of his major study of medieval biblical exegesis, tracing the traditional fourfold method of reading scripture, the literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical senses, across the medieval Christian interpretive tradition. Its strength is that it remains the standard scholarly account of this interpretive framework, grounded in de Lubac's own deep familiarity with the patristic and medieval sources he traces, first published in French between 1959 and 1964 and translated into English beginning with this 1998 volume. Its limit is that it is a study of the Christian, largely Catholic, exegetical tradition specifically, so a claim about how Jewish or other traditions read scripture in comparable multi-layered ways needs a different, tradition-specific source.