The Allegory of Love: A Study In Medieval Tradition (Canto Classics)

Product Information

This is a scholarly work, and not intended for a layman like me; I comprehend maybe a tenth of it. That's my failing and not the author's.

A DETAILED SUMMARY

The allegory of love has expanded my approach to poetry and literature in general. Lewis begins by introducing and reinforcing the idea that "the romantic" is that which unites the conscious and unconscious mind. From this idea, Lewis introduces the two prime romantic structures: allegory, and symbolism. Allegory is the structure for representing what is immaterial (emotions, virtues, vices, etc.) in picturable terms. Symbolism, particularly religious symbolism, is an inversion of allegory that seeks to find the deeper realities that underlay the visible. In the first chapter, Lewis traces the development of the idea of courtly love from the Provençal troubadours to its full development in the works of Chrétien de Troyes. It is here that he sets forth a famous characterization of "the peculiar form which it [courtly love] first took; the four marks of Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love"—the last two of which "marks" have, in particular, been the subject of a good deal of controversy among later scholars. In the second chapter, Lewis discusses the medieval evolution of the allegorical tradition in such writers as Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille. no slightest sense of rebellion or defiance” [104]. In his De planctu naturae (“Nature’s complaint”), Nature laments the is an allegory but not a “radical” one, since “its signifi­ca­cio, if extracted, would prove to be a state and not a some of Gower’s seemingly simple phrases (such as his famous line the beaute faye upon her face). At timesWith 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. allegorical tradition but never got beyond the young Chaucer. His allegories serve as a rather unsuitable

Allegory of Love | Lewis Wiki | Fandom

prevail for centuries to come. For this reason The Faerie Queene provides the present study with a suitable con­clu­sion in spite of its Italianate writes in a realistic rather than an alle­gor­i­cal mode. Like Chaucer in Troilus (
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. they come near to offering “the concrete experience of a universal” [289]. The Palice of Honour is an alle­gory on It traces the rise and decline of the love allegory as a mainstay of European literature in the late Middle Ages. I read it to mine the nuggets of Lewis wisdom scattered through the dry strata of Latin, Greek, French and Middle English. The footnotes, when they weren’t the usual op. cit., lop. cit., and ibid. silliness, were even in Latin and Greek. (No, I don’t read those languages. Paradoxically, it only slowed rather than prevented understanding.) Try this sample of Middle English, now often found on old tombstones (sound it out; it's not so bad as it looks): Fulgen­tius (same period) explained Vergil’s entire Aeneid as an allegorical poem on the life of man, thus creating a This book is in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it.