ABSTRACT
The curriculum of the medieval grammar school or university has an unbroken connection with that of the schools which during the Roman Empire had adapted themselves to make use of biblical and patristic, as well as classical, material. As a trope, an incidental rhetorical device or ornament, allegory had already in Roman times been subjected to categorization. Bede’s distinction between verbal and factual allegory is important. Verbal allegory is a trope: it is a use of figurative language to convey prophetic information. Factual allegory is New Testament typology. The allegory of the theologians, with which he contrasts that of the poets, is typology – special allegory, as it might be called, in distinction from general allegory, which includes tropology and anagogy together with typology. The exclusion of typology nevertheless remains somewhat surprising, more especially when Dante Alighieri found no difficulty in exemplifying the tropological and anagogical level with biblical references.
