The recent two decades has seen an avalanche of new editions of medieval Qur’an commentaries. The newly published works are added to almost two centuries of publications in Tafsir, offering us a real opportunity to examine the breadth of the tradition through printed editions. As this material is piled up, the need for a paradigm that allows us to understand its historical development is becoming dire. One of the main problems of the field of Tafsir is that we lack an agreed upon periodization of the genre, even if a flawed periodization. This paper revisits the periodization of this genre and attempts to reflect on what has been offered and argues for a way forward. There are at least three major periodization schemas in Tafsir, and since they come from the Arab world, none of them have been adopted in the Western academia. Most Encyclopedic entries on Tafsir, has a tripartite division, early, medieval and modern, a hardly helpful schema. Muḥammad al-Dhahabī, author of the famous al-Tafsīr wa-al-mufassirūn, offered a three period division of the whole history of Tafsir – a division that was based on a Salafi understanding of hermeneutics. He valorized the early period and separated it to emphasize the role of the Salaf in the hierarchy of authority. His third period, the documentary period as he called it, covered the whole history of Tafsir from the time it was written down. Al-Fāḍil Ibn ʿĀshūr, the author of al-Tafsīr wa-rijāluhu, remains one of the most incisive historians of Tafsir. His book has a teleology that saw in al-Bayḍāwī’s Anwār al-tanzīl the pinnacle of the tradition; Tafsir was a history marching relentlessly to this author and his work. Ibn ʿĀshūr’s work was thus less concerned with periodization as with presenting an accurate historical depiction of the tradition. The third to offer a periodization of Tafsir was Ibrāhīm Rufaydah in his work al-Naḥwu wa-kutub al-tafsīr. This paper will use the periodization offered by Rufaydah as a basis to understand the history of Tafsir and in the process offer a more corrective understanding of the role of the Madrasa that was highlighted by Ibn ʿĀshūr. Moreover, the regional history of Tafsir, when and where did a region became dominant center (Nishapur, Cairo, and Istanbul) for the study and production of Tafsir, will be made central for the periodization.