The Body of Allegoresis: The Linguistic Realisation of Tropologica Dauidiadis Expositio

To us, allegoresis is a strange way of explaining the world. At the same time, it constitutes a fundamental principle of Marko Marulić’s poetics. The peak of his allegoresis is the Tropologica Davidiadis expositio. An ancillary text to Marulić’s Christian epic, the Davidias, the Expositio is 5500 words long, written about 1517, and included in the autograph of the Davidias. For some time now we have been aware that the Tropologica expositio should not be considered a mere appendix to the epic. Trying to take this statement at its face value, I examine various linguistic devices which Marulić uses to formulate allegorical interpretations in Tropologica expositio. This examination is done with the help of a model, which is a machine-readable version of the text with interpretational markup added (the markup is done in XHTML; the model is presented, and may be explored, on the Internet at www.ffzg.hr/-njovanov/tropaleg). The point of departure for the modelling was the theory of allegoresis as developed in classical rhetoric, but it had to be complemented by Gottlob Frege’s semantic distinc-tion of sense and reference (Sinn and Bedeutung). Allegorical explanations in the Tropologica expositio can be divided into simple and complex. The main differences between the two are in structure - how a small number of constant semantic elements is realized in the wording and ordered in sequence - and in clarity of expression (how easy it is for the reader to set up and reproduce the link between the signifier and the signified in a given explanation). The key functional (as opposed to semantic) element, the part that sets up the link between the allegorical sign and the allegorical meaning, was also recognized and marked. Not surprisingly, the lexical realisation of this element varies. The allegorical connection may be expressed as identity, comparison, temporal overlapping, as cause and effect relationship. But every difference in realisation produces a slightly different meaning. Especially strange is the last variation - the relation between cause and effect - because Marulić conceives this relation as the reverse of what we would expect. Here the signified appears as the cause of the signifier. From Christian point of view, it is logical, because the New Testament is the reason for the Old. However, what the language - the wording - says is contrary to our experience of the world, since it states what happened before happened because of what will happen later