Allegorical Poetics & the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost (Studies in the English Renaissance)

Literary allegory has deep roots in early reading and interpretation of Scripture and classical epic and myth. In this substantial study Mindele Treip presents an overview of the history and theory of allegory in and allegorical exegesis upon Scripture, poetry and especially the epic from antiquity to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with close focus on the Renaissance and on the triangular literary relationship of Tasso, Spenser and Milton.
Exploring the different ways in which the term allegory has been understood, Treip finds significant continuities-within-differences in a wide range of critical writings, including texts of postclassical, patristic and rabbinical writers, medieval writers, notably Dante, Renaissance theorists such as Coluccio Salutati, Bacon, Sidney, John Harington and rhetoricians and mythographers, and the neoclassical critics of Italy, England and France, including Le Bossu.

Mindele Anne Treip is Fellow in English at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University.