It remained for a Christian exegete to free rational exegesis from the discredit into which it had fallen. The ecclesiastical commentators even more than the authors of the Biblical Tossafot were steeped in allegorism and mysticism; but among them were some who cultivated the interpretation of the literal meaning of Scriptures, and even appealed to Jewish scholars for explanations'. Unfortunately, Rashi's works, written in a language unintelligible to the Christians, could not in any degree influence a general intellectual movement. However, exception must be made of the celebrated Franciscan monk Nicholas de Lyra (born about 1292, died in 1340), author of the <I>Postillae perpetuae</I> on the Bible which brought him the title of <I>doctor planus et utilis.</I> Nicholas de Lyra possessed knowledge rare among Christians, knowledge of the Hebrew language, and he knew Hebrew so well that he was thought to be a converted Jew. In his works, polemical in character, he comes out against the mystical tendencies in the interpretations of the rabbis, and does not spare Rashi, even attributing to him explanations nowhere existing in Rashi's writings. But these criticisms of his, as he himself says, are "extremely rare." Moreover he does not refrain from accepting for his own purposes a large number of Midrashim borrowed from Rashi. It was from Rashi's commentaries, in fact, that he learned to know rabbinical literature - only to combat it. On one occasion he said, "I usually follow Rabbi Solomon, whose teachings are considered authoritative by modern Jews." He sometimes modified the text of the Vulgate according to the explanations of the rabbi, and his commentary on the Psalms, for instance, is often only a paraphrase of Rashi's. For this reason Nicholas de Lyra was dubbed, it must be admitted somewhat irreverently, <i>simia Salomonis,</I> Rashi's Ape. Nevertheless, he exercised great influence in ecclesiastical circles, comparable to that of Rashi among the Jews. His commentary was called "the common commentary." Possibly it was in imitation of Nicholas's work that the name <I>glosa hebraica</I> (the Hebrew commentary), or simply <I>glosa,</I> was bestowed upon Rashi's work by a Christian author of the thirteenth century, who, if not the famous scholar and monk Roger Bacon, must have been some one of the same type. Another Christian exegete of the same period, William of Mara, cites Rashi's commentary under the title of Perus. The admiration felt for Nicholas de Lyra, which now seems somewhat excessive, is expressed in the well-known proverb: <I>Si Lyra non lyrasset, totus mondus delirasset.</I> A modification of the proverb, <i>si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherius non saltasset,</I> is not an exaggeration; for the works of the Franciscan monk were soon translated into German, and they exercised a profound influence on the leader of the Reformation when he composed the translation of the Bible, epoch-making in