The standard annotated Bible of medieval Europe. It carries two layers of annotation: a marginal gloss (on Esther, largely Rabanus Maurus abridged) and an interlinear gloss — short, word-level decodings printed in the white space between the lines of the Vulgate itself. It is not a commentary. It is a decoder ring, laid over Scripture like a stencil, so that a schoolboy construing the Latin could not see the word province without also seeing the word church.