Un’esegesi incontentabile

The paper presents a review of the exegetical literature in the Carolingian Age, with special attention to the different literary shapes, aims and methods this wide production shows. Although some caracteristic features can be (and currently are) attributed to every generation within the relevant century, a deeper insight reveals a multiplicity and crossing of ‘sub-genres’ and methods through the entire period. This becomes particularly evident when considering not only the better-known authors, but also the wide field of anonymous and less circulating texts: the increasing knowledge of them allows now a more articulate assessment of the Carolingian exegetical practice as a whole. What most strikingly emerges, after this overview, is a common attitude not to fix and use a corpus of reference commentaries, but to model each one his own expositio, adapting, manipulating, re-writing the instruments already provided by other commentators.