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Notes on Contributors
Jane Beal is an Associate Researcher in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon (Brepols, 2013), editor of Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception from Exodus to the Renaissance (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Translating the Past: Essays on Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn (ACMRS, 2012) and Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, forthcoming).
Aaron Canty is Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. He is author of Light and Glory: The Transfiguration of Christ in Early Franciscan and Dominican Theology (Catholic University of America Press, 2011) and of articles on medieval theology and exegesis.
Martin Chase is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Fordham University, where he teaches medieval English and Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature. He recently published Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway (Fordham University Press, 2014).
Greti Dinkova-Bruun
is a Fellow and Academic Librarian at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Alexandri Essebiensis Opera Poetica, CCCM 188A (Brepols, 2004), The Ancestry of Jesus (PIMS, 2005), and Liber Prefigurationum Christi et Ecclesiae, CCCM 195 (Brepols, 2007). She is the Editor in Chief for volume 10 of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum (PIMS, 2014). Her field of study is Latin biblical versification in the later Middle Ages, Latin paleography, and textual criticism.
Angela Kim Harkins is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. Prior to her appointment at BC STM, she was awarded a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at the University of Birmingham (UK), 2014-2016, to undertake independent research on religious experience and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She is the author of Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary
Traditions (de Gruyter, 2012), has co-edited three collections of essays, and has written numerous scholarly articles on prayer and religious experience in the Second Temple period.
Franklin T. Harkins
is Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. His research focuses on Scholastic theology and scriptural exegesis. In addition to many scholarly articles and essays, his publications include Reading and the Work of Restoration: History and Scripture in the Theology of Hugh of St Victor (PIMS, 2009), Interpretation of Scripture: Theory (edited with Frans van Liere; Brepols, 2012), and Interpretation of Scripture: Practice (edited with Frans van Liere; Brepols, 2015). He is currently producing a translation of Albert the Great’s Super Iob for The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation series (CUA Press).
J. Patrick Hornbeck 11 is Chair of the Department and Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University, New York. He writes on medieval and contemporary Christianity, and he is author of What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2010).
Gamble L. Madsen is the Art History Instructor at Monterey Peninsula College. She specializes in medieval representations of the Trinity and is currently researching a project on Trinitarian imagery in the Psalters of Jean de Berry.
Ruth Meyer is Editor at the Albertus-Magnus-Institut in Bonn. She specializes in the biblical commentaries of Albert. She has edited Albert’s De sex principiis (Editio Coloniensis t. I, 2), and is currently completing editions of Super Baruch, Super Threnos, and Super Danielem (Editio Coloniensis t. xx, 1). A list of her publications can be found on the homepage of the Institut.
Ronald K. Rittgers holds the Erich Markel Chair in German Reformation Studies at Valparaiso University, Indiana. His most recent book is entitled The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2012).
Lesley Smith is Professor of Medieval Intellectual History and Senior Tutor at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University. She studies the medieval Bible as both aphysical and intellectual object. Her recent books include The Ten Commandments: Interpreting the Bible in the Medieval World, and The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, both published by EJ. Brill.
Kenneth B. Steinhauser
is Professor Emeritus of Patristics and Early Church History at Saint Louis University. He works on the influence of Cicero on the Fathers and the manuscript transmission of Latin patristic works. His publications include the critical edition of Anonymi in Iob Commentarius, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiaticorum Latinorum 96 (Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), and the co-edited volume The Use of Textual Criticism for the Interpretation of Patristic Texts: Seventeen Case Studies (Mellen, 2012).
Carole Straw
is Professor Emerita of History at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She works on Christianity in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, particularly on Gregory the Great, on whom she has written over a dozen articles. Her books include Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (University of California Press, 1988), which was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, and the reference work Gregory the Great (Variorum, 1996).
Introduction Franklin T. Harkins and Aaron Canty
The scriptural book of Job is a timeless text that discloses to its readers or hearers—whatever their historical, intellectual, and religious location—a story of profound theological, philosophical, and existential significance. One modern scholar has described Job as “the crown of the Hebrew Wisdom-writings and one of the most wonderful products of the human spirit, ... striving to explain the deepest secrets of existence, to solve the ultimate mysteries of life.”!
Indeed, Job is, in the words of C.L. Seow, “surely one of the most captivating but unsettling stories ever told.”? From its ancient beginnings down to the present day, the sacred narrative of Job has captivated and unsettled auditors, exegetes, theologians, philosophers, preachers, poets, religious leaders, writers, visual artists, musicians, and other interpreters in myriad different ways. In view of the seemingly infinite variety of Joban interpretations throughout history, the present volume has as its rather modest aim to introduce scholars and advanced students to some of the most important and influential ways in which medieval Christian theologians, churchmen, mendicants, masters, reformers, writers, and artists read, interpreted, represented, and otherwise engaged Job, both the scriptural book and its righteous protagonist.
The essays in the first part of the volume treat exegetical and theological perspectives on Job in the Middle Ages, with the first two essays serving to establish the ancient and patristic foundations on which medieval thinking about Job was built. From antiquity, a great variety of interpretative traditions became attached to the book and the person of Job. Indeed, as Angela Kim Harkins aims to show, the most basic question arising from the biblical book, “Who is Job?”—to which that selfsame book fails to provide a definitive and detailed answer—gave rise to interpretive traditions in the ancient versions and pseudepigrapha that sought to clarify this question.
Toward this end, Greek and Aramaic interpreters not only introduced into their translations and texts particular details about Job himself, but they also developed the characters in the story that would have known Job best, namely his wife, daughters, and friends. Compared to the Masoretic Text, for example, the Septuagint version of the epilogue elevates Job’s social status by identifying him as the ancient Edomite king Jobab (cf. Gen. 10:29 and Gen. 36:33), while also presenting each of Job’s three friends as a king (Lxx Job 42:17b, e). Various Aramaic traditions that are preserved in rabbinic authorities, including the Targum of Job and Pseudo-Philo, identify Job’s wife as Dinah, the daughter of the great patriarch Jacob (Gen. 34). The Testament of Job, dated to the Second Temple period, both relates that Job’s first wife was the Egyptian Sitidos and, after her dramatic death, identifies Dinah as his second wife. Additionally, Job’s daughters, who remain silent in the biblical versions of the book, engage their father as interlocutors in the Testament of Job (Chs. 46-53). The cumulative effect of such ancient interpretive reworkings that aim at a more complete knowledge of Job, Harkins argues, is the development of Job’s saintly status in the religious communities that produced, heard, read, and transmitted these texts.
As a second foundation, as it were, on which medieval engagements with Job were built stand patristic commentaries and theological works from the Latin West. Kenneth Steinhauser provides an historical and theological overview of four Latin patristic commentaries on the book of Job, all dated to the period 380-420—namely, the anonymous Arian commentary, the commentary of Philipp the Presbyter, Augustine’s unfinished Adnotationes, and the exposition of Julian of Eclanum— in addition to various sermons and tractates produced by Latin patristic authors that treat Job in a less sustained way. Steinhauser notes, fascinatingly, that, in contrast to the fundamental perspective of modern interpreters, no Latin patristic author reads the book of Job as an expression of the problem of theodicy. Rather than taking up what Steinhauser identifies as the anthropological problem of theodicy or the mythological problem of God, Latin patristic authors focus on more strictly theological issues, making use of Job to advance their own theological agendas.
The anonymous Arian commentary (likely penned during the “homoian revival” of 384-87, perhaps by Auxentius of Durostorum), for example, presents Job as a worshipper of the one true God, in contrast to Nicene Christians who worship three gods. And, whereas Julian of Eclanum and Pelagius (in his Letter to Demetrias) understand Job—who lived before and without the assistance of either the Law or grace—as having been sinless by his human nature alone, Augustine and Jerome (among others) read passages such as Job 14:4—5a (For who is clean from filth? Not even someone whose life was one day upon the earth.) as evidence for the universal—and naturally inescapable—sinfulness of humankind. On account of the condemnation of Pelagian ways of thinking in the West, it was this latter view of Job—and of humanity generally—that was received into the Middle Ages via Gregory's Moralia.
Written and revised c. 579-596, the Moralia in Iob of Gregory the Great is the first line-by-line commentary on the book of Job in Christian history. As a number of essays in this volume evince, Gregory’s magnum opus was, to invoke Lesley Smith’s description, “an inescapable landmark of interpretation that was impossible to ignore” and, as such, definitively determined the courses— numerous though they were—taken by subsequent medieval exegetes, theologians, scholars, poets, preachers, and artists through the deep and potentially unsettling waters of the book of Job. The ostensibly ubiquitous influence of the Moralia throughout the Middle Ages is surely attributable, at least in part, to its being so much more than a straightforward, line-by-line commentary. It is, as Carole Straw shows, a wide-ranging, seemingly all-inclusive manual for the Christian life—indeed, in her words, “something of a loose, baggy monster.”
Throughout the thirty-five books of the Moralia, Gregory’s pedagogical purpose means that isolated lessons, particularly moral ones, drawn from especially remarkable images in select verses tend to overshadow the continuity of plot in the biblical narrative itself. Whereas Gregory understands Job most often as a type or figure of the righteous individual, the soul, human nature, the preacher, Christ, and the Church, he reads Job literally as teaching the Christian the utter necessity of penitence. Though he was righteous, Job’s sin, according to Gregory, was imagining that he was not guilty and failing to recognize the obligation to repent.
Certainly by the first half of the 12th century Gregory had become the preeminent auctoritas on Job, guiding generations of monastic and secular students alike in learning how to read and understand the sacred book. One of the most significant and far-reaching avenues of Gregory’s influence on students of the sacred page in the schools of Paris and beyond in the High and Late Middle Ages was the Glossa ordinaria. Indeed, as Lesley Smith shows, the content of the Job Gloss is drawn exclusively from the Moralia, and the evidence suggests that the glossator on Job—someone in the scholarly circle of the cathedral school of Laon—worked from a copy of Gregory’s full text rather than from one of several abbreviated versions that circulated from the 7th century onward. Through a careful analysis of Adolph Rusch’s editio princeps and several of the earliest manuscript witnesses to the Job Gloss, Smith establishes Gregory’s influence not only on its content and structure, but also on the very layout of the glossing itself. In producing what was effectively an adept abbreviation of the Moralia, the glossator on Job made Gregory’s commentary, and the biblical book itself, more accessible to students of the early scholastic period.
Within the general scholastic milieu, Job appeared—indeed loomed large— in a number of theological genres beyond the continuous scriptural commentary and the Glossed Bible. One such genre of considerable significance is that of the Sentences commentary. From the 13th well into the 16th century, every aspiring university master of theology was required to lecture formally on Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences. As a result, more commentaries were produced on this scholastic ‘textbook’ of theology than on any other piece of Christian literature throughout history save Scripture alone. Franklin T. Harkins demonstrates that the book of Job serves as a remarkable authority throughout the Sentences commentaries of three prominent 13th-century scholastics, namely Albert the Great, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, aiding them in grappling with a host of questions reflecting the wide range of systematic theology as it is presented in the Lombard’s book, from the fiery heaven in which the angels were created (Bk 11 d. 2) to the fire of hell (Bk Iv dd. 44, 50).
The myriad uses that Albert, Bonaventure, and Thomas make of Job in commenting on the Sentences not only illustrate the fundamental presuppositions regarding Sacred Scripture and its role in the theological enterprise that they held in common, but also highlight the theological concerns, methods, and conclusions particular to each. One conspicuous example of the distinctive approaches of Bonaventure and Thomas appears in their respective treatments of the question of whether there will be a bodily resurrection. In commenting on d. 43 of Book Iv, both note how Job himself offers seemingly contradictory views when he affirms, on the one hand, On the last day Iwill rise out of the earth (19:25), and, on the other, The human, when he falls asleep, will not rise again until heaven wastes away (14:12). Whereas our scholastics read these authorities in tandem quite similarly, thereby arguing for the truth of the bodily resurrection, Bonaventure grounds his argument in the faith and practical piety of the Church whereas Thomas’s approach is explicitly philosophical. Their approaches here highlight the different postures that Bonaventure and Thomas assumed toward Aristotle in particular and his use in the theological task.
Approximately five years after concluding his Sentences lectures at Paris in 1256, Thomas Aquinas began lecturing on the book of Job for his religious brothers at the priory of San Domenico in Orvieto. These “cursory” lectures, delivered at Orvieto during the period 1261-64, have come down to us in the form of a continuous literal commentary, the Expositio super Iob ad litteram. One prevalent approach among recent commentators on the Expositio super Iob ad litteram has been to read it as the principal place wherein Thomas wrestles with the problem of evil and proposes a theodicy in response to it. Whereas a few scholars have rightly noted that Thomas himself is not concerned here with what contemporary philosophers call the problem of evil, scholarship to date has failed—rather surprisingly—to examine his decidedly Christological approach to the book of Job.
The second essay by Franklin T. Harkins aims to fill this historiographical lacuna by investigating Thomas's teaching on Christ in the Expositio. Harkins argues that, for Thomas, Christ stands as a noteworthy significatum of (i.e., thing signified by) the textual letter of Job, that is, Christ occupies a significant place vis-a-vis the primary intention of the words and sensible similitudes whereby God reveals Himself to and through Job. Specifically, the redemptive work of Christ, in which Job hopes, enables Job and subsequent readers of the book bearing his name to understand what they may not apprehend naturally, namely the eternal extent of divine providence.
Inspired by his most famous student's literal exposition on Job, Albert the Great produced his own commentary on the biblical book, known simply as Super Iob (On Job), in Cologne in 1272 or 1274. As Ruth Meyer demonstrates, Albert’s commentary is unique in understanding and reading the entire book—for the first and only time in the history of exegesis of Job—as a scholastic disputation, more specifically as a demonstrative disputation on the contemporary (i.e., 13th-century) doctrine of divine providence.
On Albert’s reading, Job 3:1 is the formulation of the question and the beginning of the argument between Job, his friends, and Elihu that occupies Chapters 3-37; Job 38:1—42:6 serves as the answer to the disputed question; and Job 42:7-8 acts as the refutation. The friends of Job and Elihu maintain the view of providence according to which each human fares either well or ill according to his merits, though they disagree about when and how exactly this happens. Job, by contrast, denies that God considers merits, or indeed any temporal realities, in governing human life, affirming therefore that divine providence is fundamentally dissimilar to all forms of human governing. According to Albert, God alone is the true master who determines, or definitively answers, this hotly disputed question (in Job’s favor, of course). And, among humans, only Job can apprehend God’s answer and only through divine illumination. Albert presents Job, then, as a model theologian and teacher of theological truth who, per illuminationem, is allowed to share in the articulation of God’s determination of the question: divinely inspired, Job expresses the necessary divine refutations to Eliphaz, who, in turn, conveys them to Zophar and Bildad.
Although the model of Job as disputatio remained influential well into the 14th century, later scholars developed the exegesis of the 13th century not only by means of a sustained interest in the literal sense of the Latin text, but also through a study of the words used by the original authors or redactors. Aaron Canty describes how a growing interest in the literal sense and in the historical context in which Job was thought to have been written suggested to Nicholas of Lyra that Thomas Aquinas was wrong in asserting that the book of Job functioned primarily as an argument in favor of divine providence in the face of other philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, Nicholas argues that the book is a debate about why evil things happen to good people and good things happen to the wicked. While Job is not sinless, in Nicholas’s view, nonetheless his affliction outweighs his sinfulness, which is why Job is correct to indicate the disproportion.
The problem is that Job’s friends assume that temporal afflictions are proportionate to sins committed; in this case, rewards and punishments in the afterlife are superfluous. With such a presupposition, the friends find it easy to conclude that Job’s sufferings are the proportionate consequences of sins that Job committed earlier in his life. Another position, however, is possible in light of Job’s profession of innocence, namely that sufferings endured faithfully and virtuously in this life may allow one to merit greater rewards in heaven. Like a master settling the dispute among his students, God sides with Job because of his innocence and virtue; but God also finds fault with Job for his zeal in debating with Him. It is legitimate to defend oneself in the face of false accusations, but such a defense must be undertaken without impugning God’s sovereignty and righteousness. God thus corrects the false beliefs of Job’s friends and simultaneously removes the ignorance that allowed Job to believe that he could debate with the Almighty.
The last major ‘medieval thinker’ whose exegetical and theological perspective on Job rounds out Part 1 of this volume is Martin Luther. Ronald K. Rittgers provides a broad survey of the exegesis of Job in Luther himself and in Lutheran theologians of the 16th century more generally. Factors that shaped the exegesis of the book of Job during this period include the importance of Scripture alone as a source of doctrine along with a concomitant disengagement from late medieval exegetical traditions. Also important was an emphasis on spiritual edification and on types of devotional piety that drew inspiration from the suffering and crucified Christ in order to console the poor and afflicted in late medieval and early modern European society. Although Luther himself never wrote a treatise or commentary on Job, he referred to the figure of Job frequently throughout his writings. For Luther, Job is a model evangelical Christian because he is simultaneously a saint and a sinner, affirms the important roles of faith and humility, and teaches the uselessness of good works in salvation. Luther interprets Job’s self-defense as blasphemy that was induced by Satan and yet reflected the frailty characteristic even of the most faithful people. Because Job presumably lived before the Mosaic Law, Luther believes that Job is a perfect example of someone who is righteous by faith apart from the Law.
Justification by faith freed one from punishment, and so the sufferings that the faithful Job endured were truly tests and opportunities for the purification of his faith. Job’s growth in faith allowed him to see God’s love and goodness hidden under their opposite; thus, Job is a perfect example of the importance of the theology of the cross that Luther developed over the course of his career. Luther’s theology and interpretations of Job influenced other Protestant theologians such as Johannes Brenz (1499-1570), Andreas Osiander (1492-1552), Wenzeslaus Linck (1483-1547), and Hieronymus Weller (1499-1572), as well as pastoral literature, such as the 1533 Brandenburg-Nuremberg Church Ordinance. The later commentaries of Linck and Weller began to associate Job’s friends with the pope, and thus Job commentaries came to acquire an anti-Catholic and anti-papal dimension not found in Luther's discussions of the book.
The essays in the second part of the present collection survey vernacular and popular perspectives on Job in the Middle Ages. Gamble L. Madsen traces artistic depictions of Job from Roman catacomb paintings and sarcophagi in late antiquity to Gothic images in the High and Late Middle Ages. Visual depictions of Job in the Early Middle Ages extol him as a model of patience, virtue, and perseverance. Romanesque portrayals often emphasize Job’s confidence in his encounters with his wife and friends, as well as his role in foreshadowing the sufferings of Christ. In the High and Late Middle Ages, with the advent of Gothic art, sculptors and painters depicted Job in a wide variety of artistic media, including capitals in monastic cloisters, cathedral sculptural programs, and illuminated texts such as Bibles moralisées and Books of Hours. This period of increased artistic experimentation and intellectual complexity allowed viewers to experience Job in several roles. Madsen explores such works of art as the cloister capitals at Saint-Pierre in Moissac, the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Chartres, and several illuminated manuscripts, all of which portray Job as a type of Christ, a virtuous believer, a model of perseverance and innocence, and an object of Satan’s temptation. The variety of these portrayals allowed Job’s experiences and eventual vindication to resonate with the trials of medieval viewers whose faith and hope these works of art encouraged.
In addition to the visual and pictorial arts, Latin and vernacular literature of the Middle Ages also found a significant place for Job. Greti Dinkova-Bruun examines several types of medieval Latin poems, including epigrams and tituli, paraphrases of the book of Job, and mnemonic versifications. In general, epigrams, tituli, and paraphrases date from the 12th and early 13th centuries. Dinkova-Bruun surveys poems written by Hilbert of Le Mans (d. 133), William de Montibus (d. 1213), Peter Riga (d. 1209), and a couple of anonymous authors, concluding that these types of poems are exegetical in style. Regardless of their length, they are creative works that interpret the book of Job following the exegesis of Gregory the Great’s Moralia. Mnemonic poems tend to be a later medieval trend, with the most famous poems written between the early 13th and early 14th centuries. Examining the Summarium Biblie attributed to Alexander of Villa Dei (d. 1240) and the Margarita of Guido Vicentinus (d. 1331), Dinkova-Bruun identifies these poems as more mechanical than exegetical, with the focus on succinct summaries of each chapter in order to aid the reader’s memorization of the sacred text. Both groups of poems were used, in fact, for memorization, but whereas allegorical connections and rhetoric constituted the exegetical poems, brevity and simplicity characterized the mnemonic poems.
Part 2 of the present volume also examines Job in Old and Middle English literature. Martin Chase explores the figure of Job in a variety of genres of Old English literature. The sermons of A£lfric of Eynsham and other anonymous contemporaneous homilies show how Job was depicted in 10th- and early uth-century England. Alfric often applies a typological reading to the sacred book and connects the figure of Job to Christ’s humanity and the moral struggles of the Church’s members. Other parts of £lfric’s homilies are simply paraphrases or even translations of the book of Job often interspersed with commentary largely derived from Gregory's Moralia. A prominent theme recurring throughout Old English interpretations of Job is the saint’s constant struggle against Satan. A‘lfric often exhorts his listeners to imitate Job, who was engaged in spiritual warfare throughout the course of his life. Uninterested in questions of theodicy and divine providence, the English abbot is more concerned to show how to defeat the devil through patience and perseverance. Chase also examines a number of 12th-century homilies (most of which treat the figure of Job rather cursorily), two Old English charms, and several poems, including the Dream of the Rood and The Phoenix. The latter poem in particular draws directly from the parts of Job’s discourses that express his confidence in God, and it articulates Job’s certitude in overcoming death by means of God's gracious assistance.
In the Late Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer made various uses of Job in his Canterbury Tales. Jane Beal examines this classic of Middle English literature, written in the late 14th century, and notes that Chaucer often alludes to Job in the tales that deal with conflict in marriage. The retort of Job’s wife, Curse God and die (Job 2:9), often provided a literary basis for medieval portrayals of women as complaining and unfaithful, but Chaucer associates Job’s patience and perseverance with wives who have to endure the abuse and foibles of their husbands. The Wife of Bath, for example, encourages her husband in an amusing way to imitate Job’s patience, thereby implying that husbands are often lacking in that virtue.
Also reminiscent of Job’s story is the tale of the Wife of Bath, which includes such tragedies as the deaths of her five husbands and her loss of hearing in one ear due to the abuse of one husband. In the Clerk’s Tale, Griselda’s similarity to Job pertains not so much to the quality of her sufferings as to her extraordinary patience and to her triumphant restoration after being so cruelly tested by her husband. In portraying Griselda’s constancy, the Clerk displays a wider sympathy to the unjust sufferings of women in general, even if he tells his tale in opposition to the Wife’s advocacy of female dominance within the home. Finally, Chaucer makes another connection between Job and long-suffering wives in the Tale of Melibee. Melibee’s wife, Prudence, and his daughter, Sophie, are assaulted by enemies after he leaves home.
Upon discovering the tragedy, he is filled with sorrow and anger, but Prudence encourages Melibee to consider Job’s sufferings and to acquire his patience. Eventually, Melibee is won over by his wife's counsel and her own conformity to the example of Job. In all three stories, Chaucer links the story of Job with examples of patient and suffering wives who exhort their husbands to be more like Job. Job also appears in vernacular literature in the sermons and tracts of John Wyclif and his followers. J. Patrick Hornbeck 11 studies how these English authors invoked Job as an example counter to the corrupt institutional aspects of the 14th-century Church that Wyclif and the Lollards found so distasteful. For example, the ashes or dunghill upon which Job sits is contrasted with the ornate churches and cloisters that separated pastors, monks, and friars from the needs of the poor laity. One Wycliffite preacher associates the command of Job’s wife to curse God with the clergy receiving benefices, on the grounds that both cursing God and receiving benefices are snares of the devil designed to lead one astray.
Another author contrasts Job’s foul breath in Job 19:17 with the breath of Christ, the Gospel or the Word of God, which animated the early Church but which has been corrupted more recently by clergy who are more interested in worldly goods. Job’s righteousness is contrasted in other works with the oppression of the poor by greedy clergy who covet benefices and sell the sacraments, and the devil exercises mastery over those who are proud. Wycliffite authors tended not to find in Job a source of consolation; rather they understood him as an authoritative voice decrying the ecclesiastical and social abuses of their own day. Interestingly, in contradistinction to Luther’s later exegesis that emphasized Job’s faith, the Wycliffite interpretations of Job link reward and punishment to one’s actions and virtues or lack thereof. If Christians are to avoid pride, they must obey God’s commandments and avoid superstitious practices.
Together the essays collected here highlight the wide array of exegetical, theological, philosophical, literary, visual-artistic, and popular interpretations and appropriations of Job witnessed to in the medieval Christian West. Whether providing evidence of humankind’s natural sinfulness in the hands of Augustine and Jerome, pointing forward as a type of Christ in the commentaries of Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas, testifying to righteousness by faith alone for Luther, modeling the virtuous believer in Gothic cathedral sculptures, illustrating how to defeat the devil through patience in the homilies of Zlfric of Eynsham, encouraging perseverance among wives who endure abusive husbands in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and denouncing ecclesiastical corruptions in Wycliffite proclamations, Job proved himself an extraordinarily malleable and compelling auctoritas throughout the Middle Ages.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to those without whom this volume would not have been possible. We are grateful to Julian Deahl of Brill for his initial invitation to edit this volume, and we are obliged to both Julian and Christopher Bellitto for their helpful guidance and unfailing patience— indeed, the patience of Job!—throughout the protracted process of our producing the manuscript. We thank Ivo Romein for his kind assistance with various aspects of this project and his consistent encouragement, and we gladly acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for Brill for their critical comments on the work.
We are indebted to the excellent scholars who have contributed to this volume, from whom we have learned much. Thanks to Mitchell Stevens, Franklin’s Research Assistant at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, for reading, correcting, and commenting on the penultimate draft of the manuscript. Finally, we are deeply grateful to our families, who have generously and supportively shared us—for the past seven years—with the medieval Job.
Franklin T. Harkins Boston College School of Theology and Ministry
Aaron Canty Saint Xavier University Feast of St. Justin Martyr, 2016
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