Dear John Marlin,
You clearly bring up some important issues! I strongly second your
reservations against sweeping claims that medieval audiences in general
would have been able or even willing to apply methods of multiple
allegorical exegesis to non-biblical literary texts: as I had remarked
before, this kind of exegesis required a specific (Latin) training and
erudition and also a mental disposition which only a minority possessed. On
the other hand, it is not always easy to determine the specific audience
for which a given work was composed. And we have authors like Alanus or
Dante who stated explicitly that they addressed a hierarchy of readers
including not only beginners at the bottom but also a minority of
'perfecti' at the top. As a consequence, we can only decide from case to
case whether a work was composed for readings of this type.
As regards the number of allegorical senses, I recommend not to make any
decisions a priori: this was simply no crucial issue for medieval praxis.
Where we find the threefold model (literal, allegorical,
moral-tropological) applied to non-biblical texts, we can by no means infer
that a fourth (anagogical) sense was purposefully omitted in view of the
non-biblical nature of the text and should thus, as a rule, always be
omitted in interpretations of such texts: we cannot infer this, because the
threefold model too was current in biblical exegesis. Moreover, when Dante
in his Convivio claims that "le scritture" in general can be exposed mainly
("massimamente") in four senses but then expounds only three of them in his
canzones, we cannot conclude that exposing the fourth (anagogical) sense
would have been impossible or somehow 'against the rules': we cannot
conclude this, because there was no such rule and because he wrote only the
first four books of the originally planned fifteen books of his Convivio.
Now if we have to decide from case to case and cannot decide in advance
whether one or two or three or even more allegorical senses (if any) are to
be understood in a given work of medieval literature, this only means that
we have to base these decisions primarily on the work itself, on the way
how it was designed to incorporate or 'textualize' such veiled meanings.
Defenders as well as critics of Robertsonian approaches often think that
allegorical meanings as expounded in biblical exegesis were primarily a
matter of belief and not really based on textual data, so that accordingly
also allegorical meanings of medieval poetry were something which existed
only in the intention of the author or in the interpretive praxis of his
readers but cannot be verified in the text itself. While it is true that
biblical allegoresis was highly arbitrary and served, among other things,
to colonize texts of the Jewish Old Testament for a Christian
understanding, nevertheless these Christian exegetes (and their Jewish
predecessors who had started to colonize the Old Testament for neoplatonic
interpretations) had developed certain techniques of motivating their
interpretation with textual data. And if we study these interpretative
techniques in biblical commentaries, they can give us a clue how to study
the textual data of medieval poetry in order to find out if they were
created with the purpose of motivating allegorical readings. To verify
veiled and multiple allegorical meanings in medieval works of literature
still remains a difficult task, but it's not an impossible nor an
unimportant one, and I will gladly offer examples if anybody is interested.
Cordially,
Otfried
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