A friend mentions a book by Samuel Preus entitled From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther. Not having read it or reviews of it, I can only note it turns up in citations in other books about Biblical interpretation. It might be useful if we do go on to Milton.
But I just wanted to note that in the course of looking at references to the book, I found a discussion of the literal sense of scripture from the Handbook of Biblical Criticism, which might be of interest. There's also an unrelated discussion of allegorical interpretations of Genesis in Wikipedia.
