Polysemy and biblical hermeneutics

Underpinning this book's literary and historical analyses are several intertwined theological matters: the polysemy of language and Scripture, Christ and Mary each as both book and reader, medieval hermeneutics, the fourfold interpretation of Scripture, and what this all means for individual medieval readers. Perhaps it is easiest to start with a single verb whose meaning and nature epitomize the core of this study: to conceive. Derived from the Latin concipere, from con- ‘altogether’ + capere ‘to take’, conceive supports multiple senses derived from the principal notion of ‘to take to oneself, take in and hold’. Gabriel uses the primary sense of ‘to become pregnant with young’ when he tells Mary, ‘ecce concipies in utero’ (behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb) (Luke 1:31). The figurative implications range widely but centre around the sense of ‘to take into, or form in, the mind’: to understand mentally or intellectually. Medieval authors played with these dual meanings; Julian of Norwich, for instance, deploys both connotations of to conceive and their syntactical parallels in the more vernacular to behold, a word that comes to define her theology, as I will explore in Chapter 4. Conceive is a polyseme: a word with multiple related meanings. Literally ‘many-signed’, a polysemous word ‘has a multiplicity of meanings or bears many different interpretations’. In that ‘polysemes are etymologically and therefore semantically related, and typically originate from metaphorical language’, polysemy takes to an extreme the foundational metaphoricity that underlies all language. A word’s first (usually concrete) sense stretches figuratively to encompass other senses (usually metaphorical), each of which can operate independently of that initial meaning; yet simultaneously, the paranomasic potential – the pun – remains. Medieval authors viewed figurative language and metaphor as ‘not primarily ornamental but, rather, fundamental to a way of understanding, and they perceive language, embodiment, and cognition as mutually interrelated’.

In a broader usage, polysemy refers to the layers of meaning which can adhere to a work of art or literature. Dante's epistolary preface to the Commedia expresses this idea very clearly: ‘sciendum est quod istius operis non est simplex sensus, immo dici potest polysemum, hoc est plurium sensum’ (it should be understood that there is not just a single sense in this work; it might rather be called polysemous, that is, having several senses).