Allegory and interpretation after the Protestant reformation : the pilgrim’s progress and its antecedents

Abstract

This study will trace the evolution of allegory from the Medieval to the Protestant Reformation, through a consideration of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I will address the manner in which Puritan writers, despite great ambivalence if not open hostility to forms of allegorical representation, adapted the tropes of medieval allegory to serve their social and political ends. This thesis will explore the meaning and history of allegory to suggest how religious forces, both Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, have molded and formed these techniques to adapt to a diversity of literary contexts and purposes. It will show how allegory goes through a journey, much like that of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, that pushes and pulls on the strings of technique, structure, and use of the term in order to reach a point where a text holds authority over meaning and interpretation within itself. How is allegory able to be used in the mystical writings of ancient Greek philosophers, and then by the literalists of the Protestant Reformation? How did allegory adapt to these polar contexts? Is allegory a religious literary trope or a secular one? Why did writers as John Bunyan use a trope based on dual meaning to teach a hermeneutics of a single truth? Such questions will be considered and answered, as the project attempts to present a brief survey of the history of allegory from ancient Greece to 16th century BCE England. After highlighting the malleability of allegory throughout history, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress will be closely studied in light of the re-defined allegorical trope. I will argue that Bunyan does not contradict the literalism of meaning and interpretation of Scripture, but rather that allegory has been able to adapt to the theological hermeneutics of Bunyan and other Lutherans by attributing its dual meanings to a single truth. I will also present the discovery that the ways in which Protestant writers used allegory, was not with the intent to encourage fanc