Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation

Christopher Ocker's book is a study of the interpretation of the Bible in the late Middle Ages. He argues that interpreters developed a biblical poetics very similar to that cultivated and promoted by Protestants in the sixteenth century, which was reinforced by the adaptation of humanist rhetoric to Bible reading after Lorenzo Valla. This comparative study is derived from a variety of unpublished commentaries as well as more familiar works by Nicholas of Lyra, John Wyclif, Jean Gerson, Denys the Carthusian, Wendelin Steinbach, Desiderius Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin.

Christopher Ocker is Associate Professor of History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley.