New Perspectives on Rashi’s peshat Agenda in Light of St. Bruno the Carthusian

Scholars have long sought to explain what motivated Rashi to advance his novel exegetical agenda that privileged “the peshat of scripture.” Eleazar Touitou and Sarah Kamin argued that Rashi was inspired by contemporaneous developments in Christian Bible interpretation. They pointed to the increasing attention paid to the sensus litteralis in the twelfth-century school of St. Victor, assuming that there were precedents for this trend in Rashi’s time. In this paper we investigate a striking example of such a precedent that offers a clear parallel to Rashi. As recent scholarship has brought to light, a new Christian interpretive trend was advanced by Bruno of Cologne (c. 1030–1101), master at the cathedral school of Rheims (65 miles from Troyes) from the mid-1050s until c. 1080 (after which he would found the Carthusian monastic order and become known as St. Bruno the Carthusian). In his Psalms interpretations, which circulated in northern France, Bruno developed a grammatical method of analyzing King David’s words as classical grammarians had glossed Virgil. Whereas the influential Church Fathers Augustine and Cassiodorus focused on the Christological “spiritual” senses of the Psalms and tended to interpret individual verses atomistically, Bruno sought to interpret each psalm as a cohesive literary unit, and selected the patristic interpretations that best reflect David’s prophetic intentions accordingly. On occasion he specifically marginalizes “spiritual” or “allegorical” patristic interpretations that do not accord with the language or sequence of the verses—criteria Rashi uses in his critical selection of midrashic material.