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

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While the bulk of the book elaborates the development and use of allegory in medieval love poetry, my imagination was captured most by the potentially apologetic (in the Christian sense) logic behind his claim that allegory and symbolism are the inverse of each other. Lewis then devotes a long, detailed, and interesting chapter to La Roman de la Rose, which is an Old French allegorical poem about a young man seeking to gain access to a garden and the rose that is guarded there.

Released in 1936, The Allegory of Love is an influential exploration of the allegorical treatment of love in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The next sections discuss the poems from the Romance of the Rose, through Chaucer, Gower, some of the lesser poets, and Spencer. Lewis himself noted that this theoretical construction did not quite fit the texts he analyzed in detail, and the whole approach is now regarded as at best problematic, and by many as simply wrong.

Lewis and Hathaway shift through clues and soon discover the owner of the mirror is comparative religion Professor Hamid Jassim (Art Malik – Jewel in the Crown), who reported the mirror stolen from his college office the day of the book launch. The captions inform the reader what the book is about, not about the illustrations or artists; they amount to an extended blurb, rather than a contribution to understanding the text.

Attending the party is DI Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whatley) guest of his boss Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent (Rebecca Front) who is intent upon matchmaking widower Lewis with her college friend Ginny Harris (Anastasia Hille – Foyle’s War), who is also Dorian’s mother. Allegory of Love is a literary criticism book, but it also offers a good overview of allegory and the medieval era.

Since Lewis presented the material with unusual clarity and wit, however, he has come to be treated as an authoritative source on "Courtly Love" theory by some, and attacked as such by others. When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. The second chapter watches the rise of allegory from antiquity to the brief set allegories in Chrétien de Troyes, observing that as the gods begin to recede in Lucan and especially in Statius (especially Thebaid), personifications such as Fortuna or Natura begin to take on more and more character, until we see them break forth in Prudentius and Claudian (and Ausonius!

Presumably, HarperCollins, a major publisher with a long Kindle catalogue, tried to do the job right. It was begun by Guillaume de Lorris, who did not finish it, and completed most famously by Jean de Meun, who had a very different conception of how the poem should proceed. Lewis can be viewed as being a bit prettier I suppose than the Morse classics, but that doesn't always mean that it is less gritty.Laura Hobson (Clare Holman) are first on the scene finding a brutal murder by what appears to be an antique Persian mirror. A very detailed analysis of medieval chivalric love literature, especially in its allegorical form, whose main example is precisely "Le roman de la rose". Footnotes are missing entirely, including those which provide original texts for quotations which Lewis translates in the main text. The Allegory of Love is a scholarly book, but I think it can be read with enjoyment by anyone interested in medieval poetry.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. will be sent by 1st class mail, those between 1 kg and 2 kg will be sent by 2nd class mail, and those weighing over 2 kg will be sent by courier. Someday I'll read it again, in the spirit of a child learning new multi-syllable words from the conversation of adults.It charts the development, through literature, of the kind of romanticisation of relationships we do now, and the development of chivalry.