| In the decades preceding the Protestant Reformation in 1517 several Northern Renaissance humanists, notably Colet in England, Lefevre in France, Reuchlin in Germany, and above all Erasmus, turned to the study of the Scriptures in earnest and made the Bible a top priority in their research. During this same period non-humanists also "discovered" the Bible in a new way, some, like Luther, through their own research, some by reading Erasmus' Greek New Testament. This rise of interest in the Bible around 1500 is somewhat paradoxical for two reasons. First, Renaissance humanism was for a long time oriented to the recovery of the classical heritage more than to the revival of the Christian tradition. Second, the medieval study of the Bible at the universities had with some exceptions been languishing since the death of Nicholas of Lyra in 1349.;Two central conclusions emerge from this study. First, Nebrija, by becoming probably the first to elaborate on the philological approach to the Bible found in Valla's Annotations to the New Testament, catalyzed the renewal of scriptural studies before the Reformation. Historians have tended to trace this renewal directly from Valla to Erasmus, but Nebrija spelled out sounder methodological principles for biblical scholarship, which were absent or inchoate in Valla, well before Erasmus composed his definitive Method of True Theology. More than Valla or Erasmus, Nebrija pointed up the need to establish scientific procedures for collating biblical codices at a time when textual variants of the Vulgate were legion. He outstripped Valla and Erasmus by mastering Hebrew as well as Greek, consulted Hebrew and Greek biblical manuscripts and insisted more on the need to learn both biblical languages. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI.;This dissertation attempts to illuminate this surprising vogue for scriptural studies on the eve of the Reformation by examining the career and sacred scholarship of Antonia de Nebrija (1441-1522), a Spanish humanist who resolved in 1495 to make the Bible the main object of his research. The thesis first describes the milieux of Nebrija's life up to 1495 so as to identify the intellectual and social conditions that awakened and fostered Nebrija's interest in the Scriptures. Attention is given both to the Spanish environment, where there were deep-seated, albeit poorly known, stimuli for biblical studies, and to Italy, where Nebrija studied for ten years and became a philological grammarian patterned after Lorenzo Valla. The dissertation culminates with an analysis of Nebrija's method for studying the Scriptures, an analysis based on Nebrija's own writings about the Bible. |
