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

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The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition ( 1936), by C. S. Lewis ( ISBN 0192812203), is an exploration of the allegorical treatment of love in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was published on 21 May 1936. [1]

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

The book is ornamented with quotations from poems in many languages, including Classical and Medieval Latin, Middle English, and Old French. The piquant English translations of many of these are Lewis's own work. 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.Lewis has written one of the most important chapters of criticism on The Romance of the Rose. We, however, will not explore it. The Romance is not as familiar to us as it was to Lewis, and we are probably better served by his chapters on Chaucer and Spenser. We speak of the Chaucer of Troilus and not of the Canterbury Tales. This is a magnificent essay, but I am going to disagree with some of Lewis’s main conclusions, which we will see below. conceptions and insights of the period are now as obsolete as the alle­gorical form. This may result in the modern dun­ces, it would not be safe to neglect their testimony. … If they all took Chaucer’s love poetry au grand sérieux, it is Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-07 06:01:24 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40729419 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdiscabled External-identifier My association with Lewis prior to reading this book was limited to "he's the lion/witch guy, right?" This book shows a more scholarly side - there is next to no moralizing, and a lot of historically informed close readings. Lewis' prose style is witty, and many of his passages are perceptively bleak.

The Allegory of Love - Wikipedia

Reader beware. This book was probably C. S. Lewis at his worst: an academic tome written in 1936 about his day job, long before he’d reached his peak as a communicator. Credit where credit is due: Lewis argues that in studying analogy we need to differentiate between surface and depth layers. In particular, Lewis suggests that the depth structure of Spenser's Faerie Queene doesn't correspond to the surface structure. Below the surface of the Italian epic is the daily life of the Mediterranean. addition to her, Noys, Physis and Urania are evoked by Ber­nar­dus Sylvestris in his poem about the creation of the sleepless night of a man in pecuniary trouble. The focus on a psychological state as distinct from its objectiveThe 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?

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Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms." (p. 44) Myths, he observes, are stronger than fictions. This is plausible, though I confess a fondness for the weakness of fiction. The psychological depth of a novel produces effects that myths can only simplify. Pace Badiou, "a strong mechanism cuts all too well" - this Christian strength is optional, and while Lewis' case for the Christian myth is sharp, I will remain a Jew. 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" Addeddate 2023-04-12 00:00:26 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40896612 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

the troubadours, but the much lesser known poets from the early-12th-century School of Char­tres. They were “Pla­tonic, story” [174]. Lines 193-294 are a free imitation of a passage from Boccaccio’s Teseide, and Chau­cer’s “omissions and Reality (like Adonis) ‘is eterne in muta­bil­itie’ ( F.Q. III.vi.47)” [356]. – In these cantos “all the powers of the