Physica Sacra: Wunder, Naturwissenschaft und historischer Schriftsinn zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

Was it a whale or a shark that devoured Jonah? And how were the walls of Jericho brought down? In his wide-ranging study, Physica Sacra, Bernd Roling shows that the natural sciences and biblical exegesis have not always stood in stark opposition to one another. From the high Middle Ages, Bible commentators such as Albertus Magnus and Alonso Tostado made extensive use of the knowledge available in their times about zoology, medicine and astronomy to explain the wonders of revelation and to defend their historical basis. Even with the advent of modern Biblical criticism and in the age of Enlightenment, as is shown here in detail, their arguments were valid enough to refute critics like Spinoza, Isaac de la Peyrère and Voltaire.

Bernd Roling, Ph.D. (2002) in Medieval Latin, University of Münster, is Professor for Medieval Latin at the Freie Universität of Berlin. He has published extensively on medieval and early modern philosophy and history of science, including Locutio angelica (Brill, 2008), and Drachen und Sirenen (Brill, 2010).

"Roling’s study makes a fascinating and important contribution to our knowledge of the history of biblical exegesis, as well as of the relationship between theology and science. It encourages us to consider the profound dependence of early modern biblical interpretation upon its medieval predecessors, thus challenging superficial distinctions between late medieval and early modern forms of thought… [a] fine book."
Philipp W. Rosemann, Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, 2015

"The history of exegesis is usually drawn as a history of progress. It is said to have gathered decisive momentum in the philology of sixteenth-century humanism, when the moralizing and allegorizing readings of the Middle Ages were abandoned and the conditions were set for the modern historicocritical approach. The present study aims at telling an alternative story... Thanks to the vast evidence adduced, Roling expertly succeeds in substantiating this alternative story of the history of exegesis. Yet, besides showing the continuity of medieval approaches into the eighteenth century, his study is also a treasury of ignored sources. Roling’s merit is not only to bring these sources into light, but also to demonstrate their relevance both for the history of biblical exegesis and, more importantly, for intellectual history in general."
Uehli Zahnd, Speculum 92.4 (2017).