Medieval hermeneutics functioned both doctrinally and as cultural assimilation

Evidence

For Isidore, human geography is a consequence of human history: the confusion of peoples, languages, and customs in the world is the direct consequence of the Fall, the flood, and the confusion of the languages at Babel. We all descend from Adam, and indeed from Noah; our ancestors all spoke the same language, Hebrew, until God destroyed the tower of Babel and created the confusion of languages. For Isidore, again, the confusing diversity of humanity was rationally explicable and could (at least in theory), be traced to a unified origin, to a human ancestor, Noah. While he incorporated many details from classical Roman ethnographic tradition, he hung them on a biblical framework, imposing order on chaos. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 120 (#expands, via linked claim)

Thus the main intellectual task of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of translation. Much of the intellectual energy of medieval times was spent not in the creation of new intellectual values but in the transmission of older ones. Knowledge was won not by fresh and independent investigation but by translation, chiefly from Arabic. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 458 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Fourth, there was the methodological innovation evidenced in Hoggart’s adaptation of the literary-critical method of “close reading” to the sociological task of interpreting the lived meanings of a culture. One says “sociological,” but clearly something more innovative than standard empirical sociological methods was required—nothing less than a kind of “social hermeneutics” is implied in these interpretive procedures: “we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements themselves) to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances” (Hoggart 1958: 17). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 151 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval Christian ethnography explains human diversity as divine-historical consequence — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 120; Close reading adapted into social hermeneutics became Cultural Studies’ method — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 151; Medieval European learning advanced chiefly by translation, not original discovery — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 458

Broader Connections

• Medieval Christian ethnography explains human diversity as divine-historical consequence #expands (0.85) — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 120
• Medieval European learning advanced chiefly by translation, not original discovery #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 458
• Close reading adapted into social hermeneutics became Cultural Studies’ method #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 151