It is idle to seek deep spiritual causes for literary phenomena which mere incompetence can explain. If a man who cannot draw horses is illustrating a book, his pictures that involve horses will be the bad pictures, let his spiritual condition be what it may. The author-who represents herself as a woman, and must therefore be assumed to be a woman, by the principle of Occam's razor-wanders into a forest where she witnesses the revels of two parties of mysterious beings" angels and the fiends” [86]. Thus was preserved “that atmosphere in which allegory was a natural method” [84]. to sexual passion concerned the sus­pen­sion of intellectual activity ( ligamentum rationis). In the ro­mantic The next sections discuss the poems from the Romance of the Rose, through Chaucer, Gower, some of the lesser poets, and Spencer. I found his analysis enlightening and easy to understand. My favorite chapter was the chapter on Chaucer. I had never read Trollius and Cressida, although I had read other works by Chaucer, like the Canterbury Tales. I found Lewis' analysis of Cressida very compelling and psychological. For me it was worth the whole book.

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imaginative” [308]; his line is “Wonder” rather than “wonders” [307]. Just below the sur­face of “marvel­ous Paul, in Epictetus, in Marcus Aurelius, and in Tertullian” [60]. This awareness of inner conflict ( bellumwith accidents, while the personifications are strictly tools of expression. Symbol­ism, in contrast, is The last quote is found in the midst of Lewis’ analysis of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The larger context is that most of the apparent dichotomies of good and evil, light and darkness, justice and injustice are not equal and opposing realities but the opposition of a diseased, crippled, decayed version on the one. Light is not an absence of darkness; darkness is an absence of light. (Ask any physicist. The same with hot and cold.) I haven’t worked out all the implications, but this set my mind buzzing. And isn’t that why we read?

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition [PDF] The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

by a pitched battle” [68]. A better image is that of a journey. This is why Seneca may remind us of Bunyan and why Book Genre: Christian, Classics, Criticism, Historical, History, Literary Criticism, Literature, Medieval, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Poetry With the rise of allegory, and before the rise of Thomism’s Aristotle, the medievals had to find a place for “Natura.” Rather than an opposition between nature and grace, Lewis notes, “Nature appears, not to be corrected by grace, but as the goddess and vicaria of God, herself correcting the unnatural” (111). Whatever its undeniable explanatory power may have been, Platonism always had a dangerous relationship with paganism. truths was well estab­lished and lasted as late as … [Mil­ton’s] Comus … poetry that is religious without

mean” [271]. For all its un­pleas­antness, the poem served to bring “more of our experi­ence” into the realm of poetry after Vergil could develop a tendency toward allegory. “ The twilight of the gods is the mid-morning Chaucer we find the same subject matter [as in the Roman’s radical allegory], that of chivalrous love; but the they come near to offering “the concrete experience of a universal” [289]. The Palice of Honour is an alle­gory on

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

launched from the height of her ladyhood” [124]; the word derives from domi­narium, “lordliness” in the sense of haughtiness (>Appendix II). two worlds is the real one” [42]. A fusion of Frauen­dienst and the offi­cial religion was not achieved yet. Any­one conceptions and insights of the period are now as obsolete as the alle­gorical form. This may result in the modern though he was not a particularly talented one. The Testament of Love, writ­ten in prison toward the end of hisstory” [174]. Lines 193-294 are a free imitation of a passage from Boccaccio’s Teseide, and Chau­cer’s “omissions and persons, and the result may be awkward. The “machinery” of the Roman – the successive scenes of action: The forest example is cool, but it is extraordinary that Lewis is here arguing for something resembling self-id on nominalist grounds. If a traditionalist Christian like Lewis can recognize trans women in 1936, the contemporary Church has no excuse for its continued betrayal of trans folks. sleepless night of a man in pecuniary trouble. The focus on a psychological state as distinct from its objective story about love with­out needing allegory: “ Alle­gory has taught him how to dispense with alle­gory” [178].