Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages Series

Series Editors: Denis Renevey, University of Lausanne, Switzerland and Diane Watt, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The Glossa Ordinaria
Medieval Hypertext

David A. Salomon

Approx. pp 160 216 x 138mm September 2006 Hardback
ISBN-10 0-7083-1823-1
ISBN-13 978-0-7083-1823-2
10 b/w illustrations

book cover ‘… contributes to an important growth area in twentieth- to twenty-first-century medieval scholarship … clear in its aims and objectives, coherent, very well balanced and likely to generate new insights into medieval literary culture.’ Professor Diane Watt, Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

The Glossa Ordinaria was the most important medieval glossed Bible and has a huge influence on both secular and religious literature of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Essentially a presentation of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, the Glossa Ordinaria is also a network of texts connected by a complex system of marginal and interlinear notation.

Medieval Hypertext is not only an introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria itself. It also proposes a theory of reading the Glossa Ordinaria in the light of contemporary work on hypertext theory. David Salomon argues that the elaborate inter-textual notation can most profitably read in terms of a ‘boundary-less’ hypertext system involving a complex series of interactions between text and reader, and demonstrates possible methods of reading the Glossa Ordinaria in the light of the hypertext theory.

David Salomon is Associate Professor of English at Russell Sage College, New York. He has edited The Works of Gregory of Nyssa on CD-ROM and has published widely on medieval mystical writings in addition to having written and maintained numerous online information sources and websites.