Hugh of Saint-Cher

Hugh was born about 1200 at Saint-Cher, near Vienne in southeastern France. He studied at Paris, theology, and also civil and canon law, and was teaching there when he joined the newly founded Dominican order in 1225. He was made provincial of the Dominicans in France, twice, and taught theology at the convent of Saint-Jacques in Paris, the order's intellectual headquarters. In 1244 he was made a cardinal, the first Dominican ever to be one. He died at Orvieto on 19 March 1263.

As a cardinal he was used constantly as a legate and negotiator, and he had a hand in the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi.

His lasting work was done at Saint-Jacques, and it is the kind of work that only a large organized team can do.

The first is the Postillae, a running commentary on the entire Bible, the first complete one produced by the Dominicans, drawing on the Gloss and on the fathers and adding the questions of the schools. It filled eight volumes in print and was used everywhere for the next three centuries.

The second is the concordance, and it changed how the Bible could be studied.

Before about 1230, if you wanted every passage where Scripture uses the word light, you had to remember them. Hugh set the friars of Saint-Jacques to building an index instead: every significant word in the Latin Vulgate, listed alphabetically, with every place it occurs. To make the references work they used the chapter divisions recently introduced by Stephen Langton, and subdivided each chapter into seven lettered sections, since verse numbers did not yet exist. The tradition says five hundred friars worked on it. The number is probably inflated, but the scale was real: this was assembly-line scholarship, done by hand, decades before anyone in Europe had a printing press.

The first version was too bare, giving references without context. A second and third revision at Saint-Jacques added quotations. That edition became the ancestor of every biblical concordance since, including the ones on the shelf behind a preacher today.

Hugh also produced a correctorium, a critical apparatus recording variant readings of the Latin Bible, which is an early piece of genuine textual criticism.

He is here because someone had to decide that a book so large needed an index, and then get five hundred men to make one.

Sources: Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; Hugh of Saint-Cher, Postillae in universa Biblia; Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).