Schriftsinn und Epochalität is a volume consisting of fourteen essays that are the results of a conference held at the Universität zu Köln during three days in September 2014. The symposium was organized in honor of Gerhard Regn, a scholar who has devoted a good part of his career to Petrarch. It is therefore not surprising that Petrarch is one of the few authors who feature in two of the contributions to this festschrift—namely, in Bernhard Huss's essay on the Triumphi and in the opening chapter, a quasi-monograph by Andreas Kablitz, who dedicates a substantial portion of his study on the “Die doppelte Ontologisierung der Allegorie in der westlichen Kultur” (Double ontologization of allegory in Western culture) to sonnet 263 of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. The overlap is all the more noteworthy in a book that covers a wide range of materials, spanning from medieval allegorical exegesis of liturgy to twentieth-century literature. What gives coherence to the volume is its focus on the fascinating question of the “spiritual sense of the word,” in line with the opening quotation from Friedrich Ohly's Sensus Spiritualis. Arguably the most profound hermeneutical problem among those elaborated by medieval thought, this question is crucial for the concepts of allegory and symbol, which in their turn have always proven to be extremely difficult to define. As the editors explain in their introduction, the purpose of this book consists in demonstrating the historical significance of these two concepts, meaning that clarifying them in context allows one not only to better understand ideas about Sinn developed in a given era, but also to shed light on the specificity of the epoch itself.

The choice of the topics mirrors this task by focusing on transitional figures (e.g., Petrarch between Augustine and humanism), on shifting moments in literary genres (e.g., allegory in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and in Marino's Adone), and also on more nuanced definitions of a given epoch (in this last case I would single out Florian Mehltretter's essay on the hidden sources of the conception of symbol in the French Enlightenment). It is a path of research that German scholarship has been constantly following in the last decades, reflecting often upon the notion of “epistemological rupture” conceived by Gaston Bachelard and then adopted by Michel Foucault, whose name not by chance appears in Franz Penzenstaldler's essay on the new kind of interest in classical mythology that arose in the French Renaissance, and in Klaus Hempfer's contribution on allegorical readings of the epic in sixteenth-century Italy. Referring already in the title to the consequences for the theory of interpretation of the allegoresis, Hempfer's study highlights another important goal of the book—namely, to establish a dialogue between the historical research on the specific problem of allegory/allegoresis and the theoretical reflection upon the transhistorical categories that scholars use in their research. This is probably the most valuable feature of the book, the one that makes it possible to read it as a collection of separate essays each dedicated to an independent topic not even limited to the Renaissance (the last study, for example, is about Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia), and also as a collective attempt to define through a historical approach categories that have challenged theorists from the Middle Ages up to modern and postmodern philosophy.

The topics (and also the length) of the essays being extremely diverse, the fact that the volume lacks a comprehensive bibliography is certainly justifiable. However, an index would have been helpful in unifying the themes of the collection, and, more importantly, a bibliography at the end of each article would have made the search for references easier. That lacuna notwithstanding, this is a valuable book whose essays both individually contribute to their fields and collectively provide a model for historically and theoretically grounded research.