Nicholas of Gorran

Nicholas was born about 1232 at Gorran, in Brittany. He entered the Dominican order at Paris around 1250 and spent his life in the order's houses in France. He was prior of the great Dominican convent of Saint-Jacques in Paris, and earlier prior at Évreux. He is often said to have been confessor to Philip IV of France; the claim appears in the older accounts and is not securely documented. He died about 1295. The Dominicans existed to preach, and everything Nicholas wrote was aimed at that. He produced commentaries — postillae — on the whole New Testament and on a large part of the Old: the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the wisdom books, the prophets, and the Gospels, Acts, the epistles, and Revelation. He also left several volumes of model sermons for the Sundays and feasts of the year, and distinctiones, which are alphabetical lists of biblical images and the various senses each could carry — a preacher's toolkit. His method is brisk. He divides a passage into its parts, notes the grammar and the connections, quotes the fathers briefly, and moves on. He is more interested in getting a preacher to the point of the text than in speculation. Where a difficulty arises he says what it is and gives the standard answer. That is exactly why he was copied so heavily. A parish priest or a travelling friar with one shelf of books wanted something that would get him through a chapter on Saturday night, and Nicholas of Gorran did that better than most. His commentaries survive in a very large number of manuscripts and were printed repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Antwerp, Lyons, Cologne, Paris — long after the Middle Ages had ended. His works were also confused with other men's, as commonly happened; some of what circulated under his name belongs to other Dominicans, and modern cataloguers are still sorting it. He is on this wall as a representative of a whole class of men the Middle Ages produced in quantity and history mostly forgets: the friar-scholars who never founded a school of thought, never fought a famous battle, and simply wrote the books that let thousands of ordinary preachers stand up on Sunday and explain the text. Sources: Nicholas of Gorran, Postilla super Epistolas Pauli and Postilla super Apocalypsim (printed editions, Antwerp and Lyons); Jacques Quétif and Jacques Échard, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).