BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES: Early Medieval Exegesis in the Medieval Latin West: Sources and Forms

O'Loughlin's introduction sets these articles in the context of this phenomenon of recycling and interacting with the past, based on three assumptions: that "there is de facto a continual appeal to the past in every theological act" (xi); that theology is "constantly changing and in the process understanding its declared 'sources' anew" (xii); that "the results of one generation's recycling of the past leaves an imprint on the tradition altering it for subsequent generations" (xiii). For O'Loughlin, these are the "central planks" to the discipline of historical theology, and each essay selected examines the traditions of Christianity at work in medieval biblical exegesis mostly between the sixth and eighth centuries (with a couple of forays into earlier and later centuries). Since the 1990s, however, scholarship in this area has grown; O'Loughlin himself admits that some of his footnotes are dated and that he would not "necessarily restate some of the positions now in the same terms" (ix). The first article, "Aquae Super Caelos (Gen. 1:6-7): The First Faith-Science Debate?", which looks back to as early as the fourth century, opens the theme of patristic inheritance by exploring the problem, for Christians, of reconciling the account of creation in Genesis and the 'waters above the heavens' with late classical cosmology.