Editing Allegory (section)

==Medieval allegory==
{{see also|Four senses of Scripture}}
[[File:British School 17th century - Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield - Google Art Project.jpg|thumbnail| [[English art|British School]] 17th century – ''Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield''. Sometimes the meaning of an allegory can be lost, even if art historians suspect that the artwork is an allegory of some kind.<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/6393/portrait-of-a-lady-called-elizabeth-lady-tanfield-english-school |work=ArtFund.org |title=Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield by Unknown Artist |publisher=Art Fund}}</ref>]]
Allegory has an ability to freeze the temporality of a story, while infusing it with a spiritual context. Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a ''reality'' underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances. Thus, the Papal Bull ''[[Unam Sanctam]]'' (1302) presents themes of the unity of [[Christendom]] with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as facts on which is based a demonstration with the vocabulary of logic: "''Therefore'' of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they ''necessarily'' confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ." This text also demonstrates the frequent use of allegory in religious texts during the Medieval Period, following the tradition and example of the Bible.

In the late 15th century, the enigmatic ''[[Hypnerotomachia]]'', with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and [[masque]]s on contemporary allegorical representation, as [[Renaissance humanism|humanist dialectic]] conveyed them.

The denial of medieval allegory as found in the 12th-century works of [[Hugh of St Victor]] and [[Edward Topsell]]'s ''Historie of Foure-footed Beastes'' (London, 1607, 1653) and its replacement in the study of nature with methods of categorisation and mathematics by such figures as naturalist [[John Ray]] and the astronomer [[Galileo]] is thought to mark the beginnings of early modern science.<ref>{{cite book |author-link=Peter Harrison (historian) |last=Harrison |first=Peter |title=The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science |url=https://archive.org/details/bibleprotestanti00harr |url-access=limited |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=0-521-59196-1 |page=[https://archive.org/details/bibleprotestanti00harr/page/n13 1]–10 |chapter=Introduction |date=2001}}</ref>