Medieval Allegory

Medieval thinkers loved allegory.  For them it was more than an explanatory technique, or a form of colorful language, as it is now.  "Her eyes were like limpid pools of deep blue water" (that sort of thing—that's actually metaphor, as technically allegory is one thing just standing for something else, but you get the idea).  Rather it was an insight into the way that the universe functioned.

Medieval people wanted to believe (as do we all) that life and the universe have some purpose, some meaning, that it isn't just a series of random events.  Allegories could help us figure it out.  At the most basic level, medicinal objects might contain clues as to their purpose.  So caraway seeds could stand for human "seed" or semen, and a woman trying to get pregnant might stick some on her thighs.  We know this, because priests told women not to do so, as it was pagan superstition (and told them often enough and loudly enough that it must have been fairly common).  But even herbalists in monasteries knew that visual appearance carried clues.  If the Middle Ages had had kidney beans (they didn't, as kidney beans are New World), everyone would have known they were good for treating diseases of the kidney.

In a broader sense, good and evil were associated respectively with beauty and vileness.  So a saint appearing in a vision always had a beautiful face, and devils routinely were accompanied by horrible smells, even if they were not found actually lurking in stinky latrines, which indeed they often were.  When a medieval author wrote that someone suddenly came to face to face with a huge black horse, ugly and with fiery eyes and decayed (but sharp) teeth, it wouldn't be a big secret that it was the devil in disguise.  Surprising how many slow-learner heroes in the stories hopped on anyway.  Were they in for a shock!

On a more serious theological note, medieval thinkers read the Bible allegorically.  In spite of some modern efforts to say that the Bible must be taken literally, that's actually impossible, as there are too many things in it that either contradict each other (like big pieces of the Old and New Testament) or else present unedifying spectacles, like Noah being drunk and naked (they leave out that part in the Noah's Ark stories), or Old Testament patriarchs having children with their handmaidens/slaves.

But allegory presented an excellent way to deal with the parts of the Bible that were problematic if read too literally (some sections, of course, especially the life of Jesus, were read very literally).  The "Song of Solomon" could be a challenge, given that it is a long love poem, in which the lover speaks of kissing his beloved behind the knees and the like.  But as soon as it was decided that it could be read as an allegory of the love of Christ for His church, all the problems vanished away.

Medieval literature also used allegory in a religious sense.  You may have been exposed to "Pilgrim's Progress," a slightly post-medieval work in which the hero, Pilgrim, makes a journey through life, meeting people with names like Good Advice.  Real subtle it's not.  But medieval people would have loved it.

On the other hand, you have the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose (not to be confused with "Romance of the Rose, or Guillaume de Dole").  It starts as a delicate allegory of the would-be lover in a garden, and there's a special rose within a wall, and as he tries to decide how to reach it he has to deal with people called things like (again) Good Advice or, alternately, Bad Advice.  The original author never finished it.  A slightly later author decided the young hero had been hanging around being delicate far too long.  So this later author had the hero pick up a battering ram, with two big sacks slung over it near one end ("for balance"), and ram his way straight in to where the rose was.  Talk about subtlety!