Early Medieval Allegory and the Logic of Found Objects

A metaphor's real referent may be said to disappear into its figurative meaning, but early medieval poems demonstrate a penchant for preserving and reifying those referents. This contrary conception of metaphor owes to metaphysical expectations that are at work in early reasoning, especially in regards to the signification of word-units. Taking Tzvetan Todorov's history of allegory as a point of departure, this article studies verbal signification in Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae and Carolingian grammar-logic in order to reframe the early medieval orientation to allegory and tropes as discussed by Bede, Alcuin, and John Scotus Eriugena. We discover a metaphysical schema in early grammar and logic that is left under-studied by the modern history of semiotics. Extending to rhetorical and poetic uses of words, this metaphysical schema may be said to arise from a willful error in early philosophical approaches to language, which saddles the figurative word with an unusual expectation to produce its real referent in the verbal sign, constituting style as a form of inventional proof. While this period is not known for developments that contribute to the strength of formal logic, its investments fall under the rigorous exploration of interpretation and inference, making rhetoric and poetics into indispensable praxes for the study and exercise of discursive reasoning in the early Middle Ages.