Placed under the verse of Psalm 119:11—Abscondi eloquium tuum in corde meo (“I have hidden your word in my heart”)—this collection of essays pays tribute to Gilbert Dahan through a formula of strong programmatic significance. The title conveys at once an attachment to a demanding philological gesture—the patient, inward meditation of the text—and a hermeneutical horizon grounded in the longue durée of scriptural reception. From the outset, it signals a clear orientation: to consider biblical texts not merely as objects of interpretation, but as matrices of meaning continuously worked, transmitted, and transformed over time.
The volume stands at the intersection of two fields that Gilbert Dahan has profoundly reshaped: the history of medieval Christian exegesis, approached both through its concrete practices and its reception, and the study of Jewish-Christian intellectual relations in the Middle Ages. In this respect, the collection functions as a faithful mirror of his teaching at the École pratique des Hautes Etudes over several decades. It stabilizes a now well-established historiographical paradigm, centered on close attention to textual mediations, exegetical devices, and the articulation between literal and spiritual senses. This “hermeneutical leap” at the heart of Dahan’s work has enabled several generations of scholars to rethink the workings of medieval biblical commentary and its embeddedness in learned traditions.
Annie Noblesse-Rocher’s introduction goes well beyond the conventions of an academic portrait. It reconstructs a scholarly career spanning more than forty years and provides an exceptionally extensive bibliography (342 items), making these opening pages a genuine research tool. This editorial choice is itself meaningful: homage is here expressed through the ordering of works, the mapping of a field, and the consolidation of an intellectual legacy. Far from any hagiographic gesture, the introduction underscores that scholarly recognition also takes the form of classificatory rigor and methodical transmission.
The twenty-one contributions are organized into five sections, each designated by a verb—Elucidate, Gloss and Comment, Interpret, Confer, Preach. This structure offers not a mere juxtaposition of essays, but a true grammar of exegetical practices. The architecture is both sober and effective, lending strong coherence to a volume that nonetheless spans wide chronological ranges (from the Church Fathers to the early modern period), diverse corpora (the Bible, Aristotle, theological treatises, Hebrew commentaries), and multiple confessional traditions (Catholic, Reformed, learned Judaism).
The first section (“Elucider”) opens with two studies that exemplify the articulation between biblical narrative and interpretive rereading. Alfred Marx’s analysis of the episode of the man of God and Jeroboam (1 Kings 13) implicitly dialogues with Christian Grappe’s study of Christian reinterpretations of the Jewish Passover through the lens of the New Testament. From the outset, a guiding thread emerges that runs through the entire volume: how texts act upon their readers, and how readers in turn reconfigure texts within doctrinal, liturgical, and theological frameworks. The second section (“Glosser et commenter”), the most extensive, presents a wide range of commentary practices. It moves from patristic typology surrounding Samson (Martine Dulaey) to the circulation of excerpts from Fulgentius in the Liber glossarum (Anne Grondeux), from the articulation of reason and revelation in Thomas Aquinas’s reading of Romans 1:20 (Olivier Boulnois) to the relationship between lectio divina and exegesis in Benedict XII (Christian Trottmann). One of the most stimulating aspects of this section lies in its opening toward Jewish exegesis and Hebrew philology in the early modern period: Jean-Pierre Rothschild’s study of the logical and philosophical tools mobilized by Moses of Trani; Max Engammare’s analysis of the dissemination of François Vatable’s lectures on the episode of David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11-12); and Grace Milandou-Colomban’s contribution on the musical settings of Psalm 101 by Pierre-César Abeille. The third section (“Interpréter”) focuses more explicitly on hermeneutics as a theorization of exegesis. Dominique Poirel examines the theory of the four senses in the twelfth century; Antoine Gugenheim compares the hermeneutical practices of Henri de Lubac and Gilbert Dahan through the lens of Hugh of Saint Victor; Olga Weijers explores Aristotelian hermeneutics in the 1240s-1250s based on De anima. The contributions by Mireille Chazan (on Nicole Dex) and Bernard Roussel (on Jean Constans and the interpretation of the Book of Daniel during the Wars of Religion) anchor these reflections in historical contexts marked by intense confessional tensions. The fourth (“Conférer”) and fifth (“Prêcher”) sections further broaden the perspective, addressing respectively Christian Hebraism (Ari Geiger) and the Reformation (Gerald Hobbs, Mathieu Arnold), and the relationship between exegesis and preaching from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries (Nicole Bériou, Franco Morenzonie, Annie Noblesse-Rocher).
Taken as a whole, the volume stands out for its remarkable erudition and the meticulous nature of its case studies. It is clearly aimed at a specialist readership and demonstrates an impressive command of the corpora and interpretive traditions under consideration. In this sense, it offers a dense and precise cartography of research areas that are now well established. The choice of contributors and topics thus sketches the intellectual profile of a historiographical generation that has reached full maturity (almost all of them are now retired), whose work—often associated with central themes such as preaching, university hermeneutics, or theological debates surrounding major figures—has profoundly structured the field since the 1990s. The authors, in effect, each revisit their own domain of expertise in homage to the scholar who accompanied, nourished, or inspired these trajectories.
This strong generational and thematic coherence is both a strength and a limitation. It gives the volume undeniable intellectual unity, but it also circumscribes its horizon. Readers should not expect a reconfiguration of problems or the opening of new research agendas. The contributions primarily offer refined, often highly accomplished, deepening of questions that have already been extensively explored. With the notable article of Jean-Pierre Rothschild’s contribution on Moses of Trani—a post-exilic Maimonidean figure still insufficiently integrated into historiographical syntheses—the volume’s contribution lies less in innovation than in the consolidation of established results. In this sense, it functions above all as a scholarly tribute and as the mirror of a historiographical legacy that is now largely assimilated, calling less for repetition than for extension.
This orientation is also reflected in a certain narrowing of historiographical dialogue. The contributions engage closely with one another, but more rarely with adjacent fields such as the social history of religion, the anthropology of belief, the political history of ecclesiastical institutions, or the critical historiography of theological categories. The volume accords a central place to notions of reception, influence, dialogue, and transmission, while leaving largely in the background questions of constraint, imposed normativity, symbolic violence, conflictuality, or political stakes. Texts circulate more than they impose; traditions converse more than they confront; differences are negotiated more than they are hierarchized. This historiographical orientation—long dominant and deeply productive—now appears partial in light of more recent scholarship attentive to the conditions of possibility of religious discourse itself, to the fabrication of normativity, and to the ambivalence of belief.
Yet the history of medieval exegesis—especially in contexts of preaching, controversy, or mission—cannot be dissociated from the juridical, ecclesiastical, and political frameworks in which it unfolds. The major achievements of Gilbert Dahan’s work now invite further inquiry into the polemical uses of Scripture, its redeployments within medieval political societies, and the ways biblical citations function as stratified instruments of debate and conflict. The articulation between Christian Hebraism and Hebrew scholasticism, or between exegesis and preaching in polemical contexts, thus calls for renewed attention.
From this perspective, the volume appears less as a site of engagement with current problematics than as a moment of methodological stabilization and canonization. It offers a precise and valuable snapshot of a historiographical paradigm that has reached full maturity—an inheritance which, precisely because it is so firmly established, now calls to be displaced, broadened, and extended.