Judah Loew, known as the Maharal, served as chief rabbi of Moravia at Mikulov and later of Prague, and he wrote a large and unusually systematic body of work. Its central problem is what to do with aggadah, the non legal portion of rabbinic literature, the stories, the impossible measurements, the conversations between God and angels. In his own time these were being attacked from outside as absurd and defended from inside by reading them literally, and he refused both. His position is that such passages describe an order of reality that is not the physical one, that their concreteness is deliberate, and that a reader who takes them as reports about the world of the senses has made the same error as a reader who dismisses them.
The consequence is a method rather than a set of allegorical keys, and he applies it across a considerable corpus: a work on the Exodus, a long ethical treatise on the paths of the world, a book on Torah and the human intellect, and a defence of aggadah answering a specific published attack. He also wrote at length on how children should be taught, arguing for an order of study that begins with scripture rather than with legal dialectic, which was a live and contested question in the Jewish schools of central Europe.