"On October 22, 1512, the new doctor was with appropriate ceremony received as a colleague by the faculty senate and apparently immediately began his preparations for lectures on the Psalms.
These preparations included providing the Latin text of the Vulgate for the convenience of the students. Accordingly, Luther contracted with Johann Grunenberg to print, in a special edition with wide margins and generous interlinear spaces, the Latin text of the Psalter together with appropriate headings and short summaries of the contents of the individual psalms. Into the white space of one of these printed copies Luther then wrote his own interlinear and marginal notes, copied perhaps from slips of paper used during his preparation. These notes are the so-called glosses—brief explanations, mostly of a grammatical and philological nature, of individual words and phrases of the Biblical text. The students were expected to enter into their own, identical copies of the Psalter what Luther dictated from his. This was the normal way to begin such lectures. The glosses would then be followed by the so-called scholia—a wider interpretation of as many phrases or statements of the text as the lecturer chose, touching theological concepts and questions near and far and providing a wide range of support from Scripture generally and from the works of previous recognized interpreters. Again Luther had carefully written out his scholia in complete sentences, but in the lecture hall he may have spoken freely on the basis of his written plans, adding new ideas that came to mind and deleting whatever by that time may have seemed less appropriate."
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