Do you know what may very well be the most important book of the 1100s?

If we were to dip back into the 1090s, we would say, well that's easy.

That's why the Godman, by Anselm. If we were to go into the 1200s, we'd probably say

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa, that great massive work of theology. But what about the 1100s? What would be the most important book?

Someone might say, Peter Lumbard's Sentences, it was written around 115, it was certainly a substantial book and it was a classic text

for centuries after it was written. I might be tempted to give that one a runner-up however,

and instead I'd go for the Glossa Ordinaria.

It too was published right around 11.50, and for about 600 years this was the standard annotations or commentary on the Bible.

Let's take a look at it.

Glossa literally means language. And when you gloss a text, that means to add an interpretive note, usually in the margin.

And a collection of these glosses, well we call that a glossary.

So, see, we're talking here about basically a dictionary

in an expanded dictionary. Ordinaria? Well that means ordinary. It also means

regular or to be technical it means a standard form. So the

glossa ordinaria written around 1150 or compiled better around 1150 was the standard form annotations of the biblical text.

This is a massive work.

It was a collection of books, commentaries, annotations on the Bible.

And it did not just come in a vacuum.

Let's see how it came about.

Early in the centuries, the monks and the biblical scholars would be writing margin notes on the biblical

text as they would be copying the biblical text, whether that was early in the Greek or the Hebrew

or then as they began to became focused on the Latin text,

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