‘Allegory’ and ‘Literality’ in Flux

Abstract

In Christian commentary from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era, conventional categories of the ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ senses of Scripture—and their customary alignments with Jewish and Christian interpretation—undergo dramatic change. During this period, a range of Christian interpreters gradually broaden and widely privilege the category of the ‘literal sense’, incorporating within that sense meanings once regarded as ‘allegorical’. But during the same period, Christian commentators recurrently denounce conspicuous departures from the scriptural ‘letter’ in the Talmudic and midrashic lore of the Jews. As forms of Jewish commentary come to be extensively associated with interpretive divergence, traditional affiliations of ‘allegorical’ ways of reading with Christians and ‘literalistic’ ones with Jews are increasingly altered. The critical turnabout involved in these shifting perspectives has volatile consequences—intellectual, religious, and social—in medieval and early modern civilization, and the interpretive controversies finally promote far-reaching reassessments of figuration at large