The Honey of Souls : Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of the Psalms in the Early Medieval West

This authoritative study of Cassiodorus's "Explanation of the Psalms" is an engaging and scholarly guide to one of the most influential works in the medieval church. As well as being a thorough and very readable exploration of Cassiodorus's important book, "The Honey of Souls" takes the reader on a captivating journey through the intellectual world of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, tracing the transmission of knowledge and learning and demonstrating with great skill the centrality of the Psalms to the life and worship of the early medieval church. In this book, Derek Olsen provides a fascinating insight into a rich, profound, and now largely unfamiliar way of reading the Psalms, one that reveals the unexpected layers of meaning upon meaning to be found within these well-loved texts. List of Abbreviations vii Introduction ix Chapter One: The Psalter, a Bible in Miniature 1 Chapter Two: Technological Challenges 27 Chapter Three: Cassiodorus and His Work 61 Chapter Four: An Initial Glance at the Explanation of the Psalms 91 Chapter Five: Cassiodorus and the Interpretive Framework 114 Chapter Six: The Preface to the Commentary 147 Chapter Seven: Editing Augustine and Reading the Scriptures 181 Chapter Eight: A Thorough Reading of Psalm 87 220 Chapter Nine: Five Psalms—Short Takes 232 Chapter Ten: The Legacy of Cassiodorus 274 Bibliography 305 Index 309 The Honey of Souls is the first full-length study of the Explanation of the Psalms by Cassiodorus. While the Explanation became a seminal document for the monastic movement in the West and was eagerly read and widely quoted for centuries, it has languished in relative obscurity in the modern period. Derek Olsen explores Cassiodorus and his strategies for reading as a window into a spirituality of the psalms that defined early Western biblical interpretation.