Medieval Reading

(Re)defining the ‘literal’ is fraught with problems. It is a project that takes us to the heart of medieval debates about meaning and interpretation, and brings into sharp relief the ambivalent role of pagan texts in a Christian culture. If we are able to posit a ‘literalism’ that goes beyond the letter strictu sensu and is extended to embrace figuration, then one traditional picture of medieval hermeneutics – that is to say, that the only medieval reading worth the name is allegorical – will be further undermined. What is more, if not all reading is allegorical, then the supposition of modern critical exegetes, that all medieval texts signify allegorically, must be laid open to further question. And if even a pagan text like the Satires can be read literally, we may have to look again at, and perhaps modify, the notion of a Middle Ages unable to resolve the conflict of Ciceronianism and Christianity (to use Jerome's model).

These questions seem to me of such importance that I want to begin this penultimate chapter by clearing some rather overgrown conceptual ground. If we are going to define the literal, then we are inevitably forced to formulate what we mean by the allegorical, and at this point, problems of both a terminological and an historical dimension begin to emerge. ‘Allegory has many faces’, as Pearsall and Salter wisely warned us.