Harmony and Letter: The Vicissitudes of Literal Meaning

This dissertation explores texts by Augustine of Hippo, Dante Alighieri, and Pico della Mirandola, linking them together through a parallel investigation of the concept of the "literal sense." By approaching the literal as its own issue (rather than simply part of a larger theory of allegory), I aim to show how these writers' works deal with overlapping themes involving the characteristics of "textual thought"--thought that has been affected and even structured by the habituation to reading and writing.;Although I discuss the literal always in relation to allegory--specifically the practice of glossing, key to all three authors--I ultimately see it as a changing cultural idea (rather than a stable institutional or doctrinal convention), and one that reveals elements of thought that are normally tacit, but undergo observable changes as thought gains a more "textual" quality across history. Specifically, in the late Middle Ages, "sensus litteralis " became an enormously popular term, and the frequency of its use coincided with changes in its meaning--as scholars have described it, the literal sense became strongly associated with the intentio of a "human author." In this study I use my readings of Augustine, Dante, and Pico to specify what this change (in the definition of and attitudes on the literal) means with regards to "textual" thought. When we consider these authors' works in relation to the changes in the sensus litteralis , we gain new insights into a theme that all three share--the intertwinement of "other minds" and "totalities," always in relation to texts, reading, and writing.;Chapter One focuses on Augustine's Confessions, and the memorable epiphany that signals his conversion to Christianity in Book VIII. At this point in the narrative, Augustine had already converted "intellectually," but what had remained was a final conversion of habitus--a cutting off of his habitual doubt. I argue that the development of the practice that most affects and conditions Augustine's mental habitus--his reading and writing--is acted out in the book in the form of his association with two teachers, Faustus and Ambrose, wherein Augustine ultimately sees the infinitude in his own mind by projecting it onto other minds that differ precisely in terms of literacy and writing.;Chapter Two jumps from the fourth century to the thirteenth, beginning with a description and investigation of the late medieval revaluation of the literal, before moving on to an interpretation of Dante's Vita Nuova in relation to this "literal trend." In this text Dante intuits a concept of totality or "all," but he encounters problems in adequately expressing it. This "all" is at once Beatrice, a written work or "project" of some kind, and then, Dante begins to make clear, the author himself.;In Chapter Three, I argue that in the Convivio's narrative Dante begins to present himself as a totality more explicitly, but with a different relation to the projected written work, and a different relation to the "public" (his readers, and the Italians he meets on his post-exilic travels throughout the peninsula). His formal approach to "totality" in these first two opere minori consists of experiments in self-glossing (staging a zealous but always failed attempt to fully lay out the relation of literal to figurative), and in the second half of the chapter I argue that in the Commedia Dante confronts the motivation behind this earlier glossing in a way that harkens back to Augustine and his two juxtaposed teachers--relating the medium of the written word to the encounter with "other minds" (in Dante's case, Virgil).;Chapter Four begins with a continuation of certain points on Dante in relation to Pico's syncretism. The themes of "totality" and "minds" are at the core of Pico's work, but rather than staging an artistic examination of self (as in the autobiographical works of Augustine and Dante), these themes lead him to examine and systematize the whole of the written philosophical tradition, in an attempt to help the reader see the "sameness" of the opposites that constitute that tradition, and by extension, the unity of the seemingly opposing elements of the reader's own mind. This intersects directly with the aforementioned literal trend--particularly in Pico's hermeneutical works--and in the last half of this chapter I use his syncretism as a means to re-articulate my argument on the senses litteralis, framing that trend as a far deeper paradigm shift than it outwardly appears.