ought to be between the husband and the wife.”^38 “Figure and type” clearly reveal a
more dynamic engagement with the text and indicate that Ambrose was not limited to
a literal reading of Scripture. At one level it was not uncommon to conflate these
terms and many seventeenth-century dictionaries defined “type” as a “figure,
example, shadow of anything.”^39 Yet at another level a distinction could be drawn
between them. William Perkins, who authored one of the primary preaching manuals
in the early seventeenth-century, demonstrates awareness to figures of speech when
he includes metaphors, metonymies, and synecdoche in his work.^40 He also
recognized the difference between “Analogical & plaine, or Crypticall and dark”
passages.^41 Perkins cites 1 Corinthians 11:24 “[t]his is my body, which is broken for
you.” as an example and explains why this passage could not be taken literally.^42
Additionally James Durham offers a helpful distinction between typology and
allegory, “[t]ypes suppose still the verity of some history, as Jonah’s casting in the
sea, and being in the fish’s belly three days and three nights, when it is applied to
Christ in the New Testament, it supposeth such a thing once to have been: allegories
again, have no such necessary supposition, but are as parables, proponed for some
38
39 Ambrose, Media (1657), 499-500.^
Dictionari Cawdry, eTable Alphabetical, 2nd pt., n.p.; and Blount, , n.p. cf. Phillips, GlossographiaNew World, n.p. cf. Lowance, , n.p.; Cockeram, Language of English
Canaan 40 , 19, 66.
41 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 54-57.^
Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 45, 46. Thomas Lea notes, “[t]his recognition
moderated their emphasis on literalism so that they did not practice a wooden
literalism that could lead to serious errors in interpretation.” “Hermeneutics of the
Puritans,” 281. 42
see Lowance, Perkins, Arte of ProphecyingLanguage of Canaan, 47- a49. For the use of figural language in the Puritans nd Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, esp. 31-146.