Underlying the medieval view of poetry was the distinction between the way in which the narrative was arranged (dispositio) and its stylistic adornment (ornatus), each of which can be seen to be closely associated with fictionality. Stylistic adornment can take the form of rhymed verse instead of prose, with the former being seen often as harmful to the truth of an account. But ornatus embraced much more than this, covering figurative language as such and including features like metaphor, irony, ambiguity, all of which belonged to the realm of fictio. (This explains why Lucan could be seen as a poeta fingens as regards his literary style, but as a historicus non fingens as regards his subject matter.) This point was made in a similar way by Lactantius, who argued that the poet does not make up the events he narrates, but instead converts what actually happened into other forms by indirect figurations, by obliquity and inexplicitness (‘ut ea quae vere gesta sunt in alias species obliquis figurationibus cum decore aliquo conversa traducat’). For this reason, too, Grünkorn includes in her survey of the literary theory of fictionality a section on equivocationes and multivocationes.

In this chapter, however, we are concerned with the other side of the distinction, with dispositio as a meaningful patterning of a fictional narrative.