SEX, ALLEGORY AND CENSORSHIP: A RECONSIDERATION OF MEDIEVAL COMMENTARIES ON THE SONG OF SONGS

Abstract

Allegory, E.D. Hirsch argues, has all but vanished from the modem world. But in the interpretation of the Song of Songs since Ongen and Augustine, allegorical readings have been central to debate. Distinguishing between Origen's explicit allegorising and Augustine's declaredly literal reading of the Canncum Canticorum, continuity from Origen is traced through to the medieval Glossa Ordinaria with the public erotics of which a comparison is finally made with Michel Foucault in his La Volenti de savoir. 'ALLEGORY', SALD E.D. HIRSCH in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of New Literary History, 'has more or less gone away'.1 In the academies of die Western world, Hirsch perceives scarcely any evidence of interest either in allegory as a literary form or in allegory as a mode of interpretation.2 In part, of course, this is a manifestation of the academy having increasingly shut itself off from its own intellectual history, and particularly from its premodern intellectual history, during this past quarter century. In the eyes of contemporary hermeneutic theorists allegory is especially unappealing, because of its ancient and intimate association with the interpretive traditions of Christianity. Since the 1960s, Christian allegoresis has regrettably been a cause of division among scholars of the literature of the Middle Ages. Those scholan who have chosen to interpret medieval imaginative literature in the light of interpretive practices developed for the reading of the Bible have been accused of intruding allegory into the interpretation of texts which were never intended to be read as though they were sacra scriptura.3 The Middle English scholar David Aers has gone further, arguing that the books of the Bible were never intended to be read as medieval Christian interpreters read them, either. In his 'Reflections on die Allegory of the Theologians', Aers contends diat 'clerical allegory', his dismissive term for