This book was much better than I feared it would be. It’s an
introduction to medieval literature that I bought it when I
was in Australia earlier this year, only because I’m a big-time
Lewis fan and had never read any of his literary work. I figured
it would be way over my head and dull as dishwater.

The facts are to the contrary, I’m pleased to say–Lewis on medieval
literature is just as readable as Lewis on any other subject. And he
explains many things I hadn’t understood, both in his own work and in
other reading I’ve done, and shed quite a bit of light on matters my
English Lit teacher in high school merely touched on. (Mrs. Martinson,
your Great Chain of Being lectures were not entirely wasted!)

I expected the book to be a survey of medieval literature, but that’s not
the case. Instead, Lewis attempts to capture the general world-view of
the medieval age–the Model of the universe shared by readers and writers
alike. In so doing he presents many examples from a plethora of authors,
and gives us some idea of what they are like, but that’s secondary. The
primary goal is that we should have some idea of the things the authors
would have taken for granted.

I won’t try to explain the Model; it took Lewis an entire book, so I’m
hardly likely to capture it in a blog post. But it has several aspects I’d
never have guessed. First, it was the synthesis of all extant written knowledge
by men who could not conceive that anyone would go to the trouble of
writing a book that was not true. Most books were old and venerable, and
were therefore seen as authoritative. And if all were authoritative,
then inconsistencies had to be made to fit. This led to allegorical
interpretations of many works that were never intended to be read that
way, and one wonders if it led to the rise of genuine intentional
allegory.

Second, the medieval world had almost no sense of historical period. We
are accustomed to clothing the people of history in period costumes; they
did not. They saw the Greeks, Romans, and Jews of history as men and
women more or less like themselves, with similar skills, similar garb,
similar institutions, and similiar habits. They perhaps knew less of
history than we do–but at the same time they felt much closer to the
Ancients than we do, for they perceived no essential gulf between
themselves and the folk of ages past.

I won’t say that Lewis has instilled in me a desire to go read lots of
medieval literature–but I enjoyed his book very much.