Torfi H. Tulinius Political Exegesis or Personal Expression? The Problem of Egils saga The study of the Bible is one of the great cultural features of the Middle Ages as a whole. The commentary of the sacred page was practiced from Origen and Augustine to Erasmus and Luther. The Bible was consulted for any kind of question, moral and theological – of course – but also legal, scientific and political ones. This is one of the continuities of medieval civilization. However, the study and interpretation of the Bi- ble was also a factor of change, as the examples just mentioned show. Biblical study was of course revolutionized by Erasmus and his generation through their knowledge of the original languages in which the Testaments were written. But there was also a change inherent in the particular way the Bible was interpreted during the Middle Ages. The theory of the four senses of Scripture, the ceaseless work of linking the Old and New Testaments together through typology, the sheer bulk and diversity of the holy texts, all this opened up possibilities for divergent interpretations. One could say that the Bible and the writings of the Holy Fathers was a sort of platform for dialogue or debate on a variety of issues of import in medieval society. 1 This was never truer than in the period around 1200. The preceding century had fos- tered the growth of an intellectual class and an intellectual self-confidence that gave rise to vigorous readings of Scripture. Moreover, this fertility of interpretations had not yet been fettered, as would later become the case, when the Sorbonne became the guarantor of hermeneutical correctness and when the Inquisition and the hunt for here- tics made strong readings of the Bible a perilous undertaking indeed. During this period, there was an ongoing debate about political issues through the Bible, among other things about the legitimacy of monarchy. This type of Biblical hermeneutics has been called “political exegesis” by Gérard Caspary, whose book Politics and Exegesis. Origen and the Two Swords from 1979 is written in the tradition of Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies. The Parisian masters who were debating politics in their gloss of the Bible in the second half of the twelfth century have been thor- oughly studied by John Baldwin in his Masters, Princes and Merchants from 1970. More recently, the Stanford historian Philippe Buc published his L’ambiguité du livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen âge (The am- biguity of the book. Prince, power and the people in Biblical commentary in the Mid- dle Ages). In this 1994 book, Buc explores how the Parisian masters, previously stud- ied by Baldwin, were using exegetical techniques to debate monarchy, at the very moment and place where the French king Philippe Auguste was consolidating it. What transpires is that far from wholeheartedly supporting the strengthening of the royal state, the Parisian masters were full of doubt, this doubt being based on an egalitarian reading of the Bible, highlighting the sinful origins of monarchy. 1 For an overview of the exegetical tradition see de Lubac, 1959–64, Smalley 1983, and Dahan 1999.