For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of 
meaning.

*     It will be useful now to notice a few more points in 
Smalley’s Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages , that indicate 
the steady development of new visual bias in later medieval 
study of the Bible.

     There was the early scholastic drive to break away from 
literary contextual constraints: “Drogo, Lanfranc, and Berengar 
use dialectic in order to tunnel underneath their text; they 
attempt to reconstruct the logical process in the mind of their 
author. Dialectic could also be used for building up a new 
theological structure with the text as a base.” (p. 72).

     To get at this process, of disengagement from the literary