Nicholas of Lyra

Nicholas of Lyra (French:Nicolas de Lyre; c. 1270 – October 1349), or Nicolaus Lyranus, a Franciscan teacher, was among the most influential practitioners of Biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages. Little is known about his youth, aside from the fact of his birth, around 1270, in Lyre, Normandy. Rumors from the fifteenth century that Nicholas was born into a Jewish family have been dismissed by modern scholars. In 1291 he entered the Franciscan order, in the convent of Verneuil-sur-Avre . He was a doctor at the Sorbonne by 1309 and ten years later was appointed the head of all Franciscans in France. His major work, Postillae perpetuae in universam S. Scripturam, was the first printed commentary on the Bible. Printed in Rome in 1471, it was later available in Venice, Basel, and elsewhere. In it, each page of Biblical text was printed in the upper center of the page and embedded in a surrounding commentary (illustration, right).