Allegorical Epic

Christopher Warner argues in The Augustinian Epic that Renaissance epic and medieval exegesis share two crucial features.

First, both share an interest in history, but one that aims to peer behind the veil of fact into the allegorical meaning of facts. Petrarch’s epic of the Second Punic War and Tasso’s on the first crusade aren’t “historical” in contrast the “allegorical”: “Rather than judging that these poems’ bases in history oppose them to allegorical literature, as is frequently done, we might perceive that it was exactly this feature that alerted readers to the possibility of their Christian allegory. Indeed, we may even most properly understand Petrarch’s and Tasso’s poetic embellishments on their historical sources as being none other than their elaborated clues to the ‘allegory in the fact’ that they presumed to reside in the history itself” (7).

Medieval exegesis and allegorical epic also share an interest in anagogy: “Just as we recognize Tasso’s aim in celebrating the Christian army’s liberation of the Lord’s sepulcher, anagogy (Lubac continues) is ‘the sense that lets one see in the realities of the earthly Jerusalem those of the heavenly Jerusalem’: it is a vision of, but also a prompt toward, that ‘which is to be desired, namely, the eternal felicity of the blessed’ . . . If a studied alertness to such prompts was one aspect of an interpretive practice that was habitual for many readers of the Bible, then in this respect, too, the transition from seeking multiple meanings in scripture to extracting the allegory of Augustinian epic would have been a natural and easy one” (7-8).

Epic writers, in short, were drawing on the tradition of medieval biblical interpretation, and expected epic readers to share the same skills.