Chapter IV

Abstract

Jonah is demoted to a position of minor importance in the period between the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the Council of Constance of 1414. He is no longer in demand as proof for eschatological claims, since the Church at this juncture, is beset by more secular problems: Aristotelianism, Avignon, or the Conciliar movement. He becomes merely one of the Minor Prophets, of far less significance than the Major Prophets. He is accorded no attention in the works where we would expect it, in the vast panoramas of Christian world history, the Historica Scholastica of Peter Comestor (d. 1180),¹ the Aurora, the versified, moralized Bible of Peter Riga (d 1210?), ² nor in the ME Cursor Mundi (xiv cent.). ³ These works have the panoramic scope of the iconography on the ceilings of St. Mark’s in Venice, or in the pavements of Siena. Of course, Jonah continues to be noticed in biblical commentaries on the Minor Prophets, but he seldom receives special consideration in a monograph. I have no wholly satisfactory theory to account for this apparent lack beyond noting a general decline in Old Testament studies on the part of scholars which had become evident in the cathedral schools of the twelfth century as theologians rapidly became more assertive. Miss Smalley states that: “We find the theological questioning but not the biblical scholarship” (op. cit., p. 77).