In this book, Matthew Gabriele provides a concise but carefully and persuasively argued discussion of the different ways medieval thinkers interpreted their contemporary events from the perspective of sacred time, with its primary focus the Carolingian and post-Carolingian kingdoms of the ninth through eleventh centuries. Gabriele’s main claim is that the scholars of this period gradually eroded “Augustinian atemporality” (16) as they continuously used the exegesis of their predecessors to react to their present circumstances, so that by the late eleventh century they believed they could discern God’s plan for the present and even the future, only to have their certainty shaken. He describes this shift as one between “prophetic” and “apocalyptic” thinking, or between believing one’s choices do not matter and that one’s actions are overdetermined (12). Throughout, Gabriele stresses the contingency of the intellectual changes because ideas arise, move, and are modified by people who hold contradictory opinions as they make choices in reaction to their present circumstances (11). As a corollary to this argument, he considers the historical circumstances surrounding the development of key historiographical concepts, like the “terrors of the year 1000” and even medieval exegesis to highlight the teleology present in previous medievalist discourse and argue for a different approach.
After an introduction that establishes this theoretical and historiographical foundation, chapter 1 describes the developments of the prophetic way of thinking, culminating in Augustine. In it, Gabriele posits another central claim of the book: that biblical interpretation is always based on its particular relevance for a specific time and place. This belief was explicit in early Christian exegesis, since Christians tried to bridge the gap between scripture and the present to understand the Bible as directly relevant to their own lives (26-27). Gabriele examines the nuances of this way of thinking in the writing of desert ascetics, early exegetes like Origen, pseudo-Methodius, the liturgy, and especially Jerome and Augustine. As elsewhere, he successfully argues for the close relationship between exegesis and the sense of history, especially when he demonstrates how texts that might seem to be about the future, like pseudo-Methodius and commentaries on Revelation, were actually mostly historical, with short descriptions of the final end in the future and very little discussion of the present (35-36). Throughout, Gabriele also considers the implications of this direct biblical application, including violence against other Christians and against Jewish communities. The chapter closes with a description of the Augustinian atemporality, which Gabriele also grounds in Augustine’s need to explain his own present. For Augustine, the present is a constant recapitulation where any potential signs of the future are inconsequential. It is unknowable from the perspective of sacred history, which instead has meaning only for the individual relationship with God. As such, Augustine codifies this primarily prophetic mode of thinking.
Chapters 2 and 3 form the central part of the argument and describe how Carolingian and post-Carolingian authors, in using biblical exegesis to suit their particular purposes, ultimately mostly ended the Augustinian atemporality. In chapter 2, Gabriele argues that Carolingian authors and those writing in the immediate break-up of the Carolingian empire reformulated the extent to which God’s purpose was discernible in the present. Sacred history became “unstuck” in the ninth century, when authors describe the Carolingian emperors as the new kings of a new Israel, and so claim that they can discern God’s plan in history (49). What sets these authors apart, for Gabriele, is the way that they used sacred history to understand their present, rather than even the recent past, as Bede had done. By gradual and often halting steps different Carolingian authors, architects, and artists gradually elided a difference between the Franks and the Israelites in a way that “subverted the late antique proposition that revelation was no longer available to humanity” (53). Of particular importance is the new way monks used their exegesis to give explicit biblical models for kings, as part of their push for reform, and in so doing, cast themselves as prophets enjoined to monitor and enforce the divine law (58-59). To make his case, Gabriele uses a wide range of sources, from church decorations and liturgy, poems about the battle of Fontenoy, collections of biblical quotations, and especially the exegesis of Hrabanus Maurus and Haimo of Auxerre. Once again, Gabriele integrates the specifics of each author’s circumstances to help explain his slightly different perspective on sacred history. Hrabanus wrote slightly earlier and directly to the emperor, while Haimo wrote more for monks and the larger aristocracy, whom he cast as those suffering under unjust kings. This slight historical distinction meant that Hrabanus looked to the past in order to repeat it, to keep the end of the kingdom at bay, while Haimo looked to the past with the expectation that sacred time would advance when the people embraced repentance (73). Gabriele claims that Haimo’s future-oriented exegesis would ultimately lead to the end of the Augustinian atemporality.
Chapter 3 comprises the most original portion of the book, where Gabriele traces the gradual shift toward apocalyptic thinking in the exegesis and historiography of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, as authors come to claim certainty about God’s plan for the present and (indirectly) the future. One of the most important interventions Gabriele makes is to recast this period as one imbued with exegesis, and to extend that exegetical mindset to historiography. So, he examines how Odo of Cluny filled his works with biblical citations to explain his current political circumstances. Gabriele also marks an important shift in the way authors like Odo, Adso of Montier-en-Der, and Thietland of Einsiedeln used the events of the present to understand the ninth-century commentaries, which in turn helped them understand God’s plan, rather than using the Bible to understand events in the world (93-94). As such, their careful attention to near-term events led to deep interest in the future, but from the perspective of reform rather than any ultimate end (94). From exegetes writing about current events, Gabriele turns to the historians of the eleventh century, and argues that they made historiography into a form of exegesis, a way to offer updated commentary on the implications of events. Through analysis of Ademar of Chabannes and Rodulfus Glaber, he points out how the authors retold sacred history in the present, but gave that history a different, more positive ending that looked to new beginnings. For example, Ademar’sChronicon retells the Book of Kings, but ends with the Franks dealing with witchcraft successfully where Antiochus did not, and as a result things seem to be looking up for the Franks and for Christians (96-97). The authors of the tenth and eleventh centuries therefore used the ninth-century exegetical patterns, but applied them in an even more intense way to read the events of the present, and to use the authority of authors like Haimo to claim to see God demonstrating his favour in the world, even if they did not directly say that events were changing for the better.
In a short epilogue, Gabriele traces the results of this new optimism around interpreting events through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, identifying how authors both harden and then loosen their certainty about being able to do so. The First Crusade is central to his interpretation, as claims that the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 led to new certainty about the future that showed itself in new patterns of church decoration (112-13). And then, as the optimistic certainty about the future faded with Christian losses in the Holy Land, exegetes turned back to the sources and created new forms of commentary, like the gloss, to try to find that certainty of sacred history in other ways, only to repeat the cycle. Gabriele recognizes that his discussion of the twelfth century is very brief, but it is the part of the argument where his connection between events and intellectual currents does not hold up as well. The development of glossing and the increase in new commentaries seems to predate the mid-twelfth-century, and so runs more parallel to the period of certainty rather than the period of doubt that he identifies. This does not discount what Gabriele does here, though, in combining the exegetical and historical thinking of so many thinkers over such a long period. He uses a wide range of sources, especially for such a short book. The discussions in the footnotes that integrate the thought of scholars like Reinhart Koselleck, Robert Orsi, and Natalie Zemon Davis do a lot of the work to add depth to an argument that sometimes moves quite quickly. Like any short book that covers so much ground, there are times when more explanation of certain points would have been appreciated, such as the claim that Orosius does follow Augustine’s atemporal framework (46), or exactly how Bede and Gregory of Tours differ from the Carolingian commentators (52). Especially considering its length, this book makes an important contribution to the history of medieval thought, not only for the Frankish realms of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but especially by adding necessary nuance to the conception of thinking with the Bible in the Middle Ages.