INTRODUCTION

From antiquity onwards, the literal sense was used as more than a mechanism of hermeneutical distinction. It was used to separate children from adults, childish learning from mature textual apprehension. As such, it was also a measure of discrimination enacted on the bodies of children, and a form of symbolic infantilization enacted on the bodies of certain classes of adults. Pursuing a diachronic genealogy, I consider here how pedagogical discourses of ancient intellectual lineage left their imprint on the most sharply politicized categories of late-medieval culture: from Quintilian, Plutarch, and Macrobius through early- and later-medieval discourses of education to late-fourteenth-century debates in England about lay learning, hermeneutical agency, and the political subject.

Clifford Geertz has remarked that common sense, including notions of the literal sense, “remains more an assumed phenomenon than an analyzed one.” To be sure, the hermeneutical tradition of the literal sense, that tendentious, thorny, academic and theological tradition of debate about literal and figurative, or literal and spiritual reading of canonical and sacred texts – a tradition that extends from antiquity, from Middle Platonist and Neoplatonist theologizing of Homer and other poets – has been the object of minute analysis for the history of ideas, especially for the history of hermeneutics. But there is another long tradition of the literal sense that, by comparison, has been so taken for granted, has been so much an assumed phenomenon, that its most powerful manifestations are scarcely remarked.