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

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Accordingly, the author does us the service of uncovering those past worlds to us, placing the old books in their accurate historical context, so that, as those worlds open to us, we will open the books. In an interesting reversal, all of the major players in this mystery appear together in the first scene. His strong religious background influenced such books as "The Problem of Pain" and "The Screwtape Letters".

This probably wasn’t such a problem back in 1936 as most of his audience would have learnt Latin at school.Just as his A Preface to Paradise Lost made me ready to tackle Milton, so I believe that this book has made me ready for Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (which he didn’t actually like), La Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s Troilus and Cresside, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to name the main ones.

i really enjoyed the overall argument about how and why romance came out of the Middle Ages, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.S. Lewis' reputation as a critic of medieval and renaissance literature; in the original, medieval, sense, it was the "piece" that marked his transition from Apprentice to Master.

Here's what I mean: we with our limited arts of story, language, image, music and film can use allegory to express immaterial concepts using material descriptive means; what if there existed a greater author with access to greater arts capable of producing a material world such as the one we observe with our senses. The book is ornamented with quotations from poems in many languages, including Classical and Medieval Latin, Middle English, and Old French.

As an English major I'm probably extra biased towards this episode because it's the most literature-oriented mystery to date. Lewis served with the Somerset Light Infantry in World War I; for nearly 30 years he served as Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College at Oxford University. Like seriously, unless you have a PhD in medieval literature or aspire to, this book is pretty incomprehensible. Fully footnoted using original Old and Middle English, Latin, Greek, and French text in poetry and notes, Lewis sticks to the academic methodology and attempts to show how the idea of love changed from pre-Courtly Love through post-Spenser. 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.

In his sermon on opposite sex, same sex relationships he mentioned one thing, one statement that "marriages a long time ago were utilitarian marriages. Lewis’s analyses also include enough detail about the matter of the poems that they can serve as introductions. Dorian’s book mentions a mirror of the same description used as the murder weapon, Alice’s disturbed younger brother Hayden Wishart (Olly Alexander – Bright Star) had been stalking Marina, and their recently widowed father Jem Wishart (Adrian Lukis – Pride and Prejudice 1995) had been having a secret affair with her.

Who'd have thought one episode could cover an "Alice through the looking glass" murder, death by Peter's sword (of Narnia fame), wrapping up with an insane Oedipal complex run amuck. As a result, Lewis and Hathaway get pulled into the world of Oxford's literary elite, only to find that it harbors resentment and jealousy and at its center, holds terrible secrets beyond all imagination. This book is worth reading if you are at all interested in some of the major (or, at least, larger) pieces of vernacular medieval literature, mostly English.