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

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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. Actually, his character here isn't really improved from his famous turn as Wickham - morally Wishart is just as much of a mess, only meeker. move a bit like this through some specimens of literature to understand the tradition he is describing and extolling. Lewis directly addressed the differences in his The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, well worth the reader's time and imminently more readable.

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. 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. One has to wonder whether he would have written "The Allegory of Love" differently after, rather than before, those experiences.However, the payoff is modern readers’ greater understanding of a time and place which served as the background for many contemporary fictional fantasies. I believe that the pieces of this story all came together perfectly in the end, and I would encourage any murder mystery fan to see this, even if they haven't seen another Lewis episode before.

We are so used to the love poetry and conventions of our own age that when we read love poetry of a different era, we assume that the poets had the same ideas about love that we do. We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an 'inner conflict' without a metaphor; and every metaphor is an allegory in little. Courtly love produces the work of Chrétien de Troyes and goodly amount of allegorical verse, as this book demonstrates. 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.

To get the most out of this book I would suggest that you at least read The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Psychomachia by Prudentius. In an amusing twist Lewis also mentioned that Faerie Queen's subtle allegorical reality is the sort that will forever please children and laymen, but will baffle the literary and scholars. It is probably of interest to note that, according to Lewis himself, the "Chronicles of Narnia" did NOT arise from his studies of allegory, and that their allegorical implications arose spontaneously in his mind.

But back to the book review, after breaking down and analyzing several hundred years of french, Italian, and english medieval love poetry Lewis ultimately cites Spenser's "Faerie Queen" as the poem that most nearly approaches perfection in the use of allegory. 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.Crane is attempting to restart the Inklings - so right off the bat this episode gives one Oscar Wilde, J.