 In the Latin West, philosophical allegory flourished in the 12th century. Authors like Bernard Silvestris, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille took up allegoresis and allegory as a way of assimilating works and ideas from classical antiquity, especially the creation myth and cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus. One of the most important, Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, is an allegorical account of the origins of the world, both narrative and structural. Bernard tells the story of Natura asking Noys to bring some order to prime matter. Book I traces the creation of the material world, and book II, the creation of man (Bernard Silvestris 1973). Bernard’s main source for this myth of creation is Plato’s Timaeus but his myth making is combined with philosophical and scientific speculation. Like Alan of Lille’s allegories, De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus, Bernard’s work is both allegorical and encyclopedic, two forms which were also combined in an important classical model for these works, Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. What is remarkable about these works is the combination of allegory with science and philosophy. These writers do not think of the mythic and the scientific as opposing discourses. Rather, the creation of new myths is associated with the work of creation, linking the work of God as artifex with that of the composer of allegory. Science and allegory are also linked by the activity of de-allegorization, the process of extracting the abstract and philosophical message hidden in the allegory. According to Brian Stock, until the middle of the 12th century, it was taken as a given that allegories contained hidden philosophical information (Stock 1972, 31).