On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, John Marlin wrote:
> I'm not a literary postmodernist, but I, too, hold suspect Robertson's
> method of applying the four-fold sense of scripture to secular literary
> texts. (I have, however, the utmost respect for the powers of his mind
> and the breadth and rigor of his scholarship - I revisit his <Preface to
> Chaucer> often when I'm teaching Chaucer courses.)
>
> My concerns are two. First, if you look at how medieval commentators
> interpreted Virgil and Ovid, even allegorically, you generally see only
> two senses - historical and allegorical (I think here of Bernardus
> Silvestris on Virgil, and John of Garland, among others, on Ovid). Even
> Dante, who proclaimed that his <Convivio> was to be read according to the
> four-fold method, demonstrates only two levels. So I think that when
> secular texts were allegorized, they were considered only on two levels.
It was not unknown in medieval spiritual writings to collapse the three
non-literal senses into a single "spiritual" or "mystical" sense.
Dennis Martin
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