In Dante's Letter to Can Grande he says that his Commedia is "polysemous,
that is, endowed with many meanings." The first, he says, is literal, the
second is mystical or allegorical, which is further divided into the
allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.
Charles J. Merrill
Departament de Llengues Estrangeres
Mount Saint Mary's College
phone: (301)447-6122; fax: (301)447-5755
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On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Dennis D. Martin wrote:
>
>
> 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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