The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

by C.S. Lewis

The Allegory of Love is a landmark study of a powerful and influential medieval conception. C. S. Lewis explores the sentiment called 'courtly love' and the allegorical method within which it developed in literature and thought, from its first flowering in eleventh-century Languedoc through to its transformation and gradual demise at the end of the sixteenth century. Lewis devotes particular attention to the major poems The Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene, and to poets including Chaucer, Gower and Thomas Usk.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Medieval, Classics, Literature, Philosophy

488 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.

Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

However, the payoff is modern readers’ greater understanding of a time and place which served as the background for many contemporary fictional fantasies. (See below)

It traces the rise and decline of the love allegory as a mainstay of European literature in the late Middle Ages. I read it to mine the nuggets of Lewis wisdom scattered through the dry strata of Latin, Greek, French and Middle English. The footnotes, when they weren’t the usual op. cit., lop. cit., and ibid. silliness, were even in Latin and Greek. (No, I don’t read those languages. Paradoxically, it only slowed rather than prevented understanding.) Try this sample of Middle English, now often found on old tombstones (sound it out; it's not so bad as it looks):

O mortall folk, you may behold and se
How I lye here, sometime a mighty knyght.
The ende of Joye and all prosperite
Is dethe at last through his courses and myght;
After the day there cometh the derke nyfght,
For though the day be never so longe
At last the belles ryngeth to evensonge.

Progress was slow and something of a love-hate affair. In addition to the nuggets identified below, I also found myself appreciating, if not understanding, a realm of literature which had been a closed book to me. Courtly love, as we all think we know, is the adulterous love of a knight for his chosen lady. Love within marriage was discouraged by church and fashion in the Middle Ages. The allegorical romances Lewis reviews were encyclopedic works which were both practical guides to wooing as well as cosmologies of nature as it was then understood, which was pretty poor. It even added to my understanding of how people then incorporated the works of Plato and Aristotle in their systems of knowledge.

Some gems of wisdom include the following: “All men have waited with ever-decreasing hope, day after day, for someone or for something that does not come, and all would willingly forget the experience.” “Potential genius cannot become actual genius unless it finds or makes the Form it requires.” “The mind posits in the past the desired thing which is really still in the future.” “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.” "Each of [Spenser's] deadly sins has a mortal disease." “Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm of truth but of falsehood also.”

The 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?

Another theory I propose is that avid readers of Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien need look no further than works like this to find philosophic underpinnings of Narnia and Middle Earth. The former certainly reflects the lessons of courtly love and honor Lewis explores in Allegory, and the latter is founded on Tolkien’s studies of Anglo-Saxon and Old English, such as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell.

This work opens a world as different to us as the wildest science fiction or fantasy of Lewis and his friend and colleague Tolkien. A world where people believed, thought, and acted differently than ours. "The deepest of worldly emotions in this period is the love of man for man, the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds, and the affection between vassal and lord." 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 wary reader might wish to try only Chapters 3 and 7, The Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene, but I warn that you may not understand either without the necessary background.

Why five stars? Because this book has sparked new thinking about life and the world. What more could we want from a book?

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great. And completed again in September of 2017. Still great.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

And I'm finished. It was beautiful, and erudite beyond belief. I think its biggest flaw is a lack of an underlying coherence - is it about allegory? Is it about courtly love? What is the central thesis? Perhaps it's there, but I'm too dull to see it.

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I'm finally starting!

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Don't read this book without having read:

Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes
The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun
Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
Confessio Amantis by John Gower
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

[Skrivena stranica · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading it for the second time, I feel like I missed so much in the first reading but maybe only my memory is weak and lack of notes didn't let me read more in the depth. And maybe I simply know more about literature than I did when I've first read it.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can see why most Lewis scholars don't talk about this one.

I technically read every word. Did I comprehend much? Nope. This is mostly summaries of works I haven't read. And I didn’t catch most of the points Lewis wants his reader to grasp.

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll return to it.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Allegory of Love examines the medieval traditions of allegory and how love was portrayed. I found Lewis's argument interesting: courtly love, and adulterous love, were expressions of romantic love in a time when marriage was not considered an outlet for romantic love. Coming up to Spenser, however, this changes. His work on allegory is an extremely helpful corrective to those who misquote him and Tolkien about allegory: "to speak plainly, the art of reading allegory is as dead as the art of writing it, and more urgently in need of revival if we wish to do justice to the Middle Ages." (Chapter 3, 116 in my edition)

A poignant read to finish on Remembrance Day, as it is written by a veteran of the First World War.

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"For the function of allegory is not to hide but to reveal, and it is properly used only for that which cannot be said, or so well said, in literal speech. The inner life, specifically the life of love, religion, and spiritual adventure, has therefore always been the field of true allegory; for here there are intangibles which only allegory can fix and reticences which only allegory can overcome." (Chapter 4, Chaucer; 166)

"We have also learned by now that allegory is not a puzzle. The worst thing we can do is to read it with our eyes skinned for clues, as we read a detective story. If the reader has some familiarity with the allegorical method in general and an ordinary measure both of sensibility and adult experience, then he may be assured that any significacio [signification/allegorical correspondence] which does not seem natural to him after a second reading of the poem, is erroneous." (Chapter 7, 298)

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outdated now, but still one of those things that you probably should read if you're doing anything about courtly love. It charts the development, through literature, of the kind of romanticisation of relationships we do now, and the development of chivalry.

It did make me headdesk a couple of times when he said things like, "Monotheism should not be regarded as the rival of polytheism, but rather its maturity." It's just -- ugh. C.S. Lewis, your bias is showing.

[Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of eight books in a set called "C.S. Lewis' Academic Works." It was certainly less accessible than other books I've read by Lewis, but it was good to stretch my cerebral muscles a little. I especially appreciated the comments in his last chapter on The Faerie Queen, which I hope to read in the near future.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a difficult book. Many literary works and authors are obscure; CSL assumes a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Old English and French [he doesn't translate]. Occasionally, though, I like to challenge myself with a worthy book that requires tenacity and determination to finish.

There were rewards, to be sure. Lewis sprinkles delightfully direct side remarks in, e.g.:

It is idle to seek deep spiritual causes for literary phenomena which mere incompetence can explain. If a man who cannot draw horses is illustrating a book, his pictures that involve horses will be the bad pictures, let his spiritual condition be what it may.

George Sayer, in his biography Jack writes "it was The Allegory of Love that made Oxford scholars realize that Lewis was a great literary critic." Evidently this book created a huge bump in the sales of medieval literature.

I likened the process of reading this book to a child listening in on grownup conversations. More at: https://alivingpencil.com/2019/02/23/...

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENGLISH: I have read this book three times now. When I read it first, I felt compelled to read in their original languages such outstanding works as "The Faerie Queene", "Troilus and Cressida", the works of Chretien de Troyes, the two Orlandos, and lately "Le roman de la rose" by Guillaume de Lorris.

A very detailed analysis of medieval chivalric love literature, especially in its allegorical form, whose main example is precisely "Le roman de la rose".

ESPAÑOL: He leído este libro por tercera vez. Gracias a él me sentí empujado a leer en su lengua original obras tan señeras como "The Faerie Queene", "Troilo y Crésida", las obras de Chretien de Troyes, los dos Orlandos, y últimamente "Le roman de la rose" de Guillaume de Lorris.

Análisis detalladísimo de la literatura amorosa caballeresca medieval, especialmente en su forma alegórica, cuyo ejemplo principal es precisamente "Le roman de la rose".

[K.P. Ambroziak · Rating 5 out of 5]

C.S. Lewis is such an accessible writer you don't have to be a literary major to enjoy his contribution to the study of the early modern period. More specifically, I love his reasoning that Catholicism is allegorical because “allegory consists in giving an imagined body to the immaterial” and the “allegorist’s symbol will naturally resemble” any material body that Catholicism has already claimed for itself. I think this observation is particularly deft and speaks to his genius. He comprehends his subject so completely it shows in the clarity with which he explains it.

[Justin Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of C.S.Lewis's literary criticism, published in 1936, took me quite a while to get through. It was challenging and fascinating, and his great zeal for myth, language, literature, and the origin of language made it to be a fascinating read rather than merely a dull dry academic work- his academic works are incredibly exciting. I have read some of the works Lewis writes about, but some of the others I have not. Finishing this has gotten me closer to reading everything that Jack Lewis ever wrote, which is one of my goals for 2021.

[Othy · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY interesting. Although all of Lewis' ideas are not spot on, his explanation of them is clear and easy to read. Lewis' attempt here is to show how the idea of love changed from pre-Courtly Love through post-Spenser and, for the most part, he does a good job. That is not to say, of course, that his conclusions are true, but that he has a good sense of the literature and the ideas and is able to explain them well to the reader. One thing that Lewis does that I particularly enjoy, though which many readers may get bogged down by, is his interest in describing the character of poems instead of simply what they say about his subject matter. One specific instance that I enjoyed was when Lewis noted how, if he were laid up in bed with a slight illness for the rest of his life, in view of the ocean, and all he had to read was Italian Epics, he would be happy. This sort of writing, to me, gives a view of a sense of literature studies that we have really done away with in academia.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

One must approach any criticism of Lewis’s style with fear and trembling. In terms of literary grace, he is the master and we are the mere peons. With that said, this book sometimes suffers from organization. He begins with a fascinating suggestion that courtly love poetry was a celebration of adultery. Perhaps it was. From there he moves to a persuasive, if not entirely related, discussion of the fall of the gods. This fall is important, for it allowed later thinkers to speak of a universe that was neither pagan nor ordinary. In any case, the point was not to glorify paganism. The pagan gods were a heuristic device.

Similar to the decline of the old gods, there is a parallel of the movement of mythology to allegory. There is a reverse movement from deity to hypostasis to decoration (Lewis 94). In other words, as he later says, the gods have “died into allegory” (98).

With the rise of allegory, and before the rise of Thomism’s Aristotle, the medievals had to find a place for “Natura.” Rather than an opposition between nature and grace, Lewis notes, “Nature appears, not to be corrected by grace, but as the goddess and vicaria of God, herself correcting the unnatural” (111). Whatever its undeniable explanatory power may have been, Platonism always had a dangerous relationship with paganism.

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.

Even though Troilus is a Trojan hero at war with the Greeks, for all practical purposes he is a Christian knight, “a new Launcelot” (220). Chaucer’s readers would have seen London in his description of Troy.

I agree with Lewis that Cryseide is neither very good nor very wicked. I just do not think she was that bad. She was a victim of fortune. Did she betray Troilus? Not really. True, she left him, but that was not her choice. And if Troilus did have a claim on her, he should have married her. If he was too scared to do that, it is hard to see why we should feel sorry for him.

We end with Edmund Spenser, the most underrated, yet easily one of the best poets. Like other critics of Spenser, Lewis notes where Spenser copied the Italians. Unlike these critics, though, Lewis does not fault Spenser for it. The problem is not that the Italians are good and Spenser is mediocre. Rather, they are strong in different ways. The Italians tell a better story, yet Spenser is a deeper and more profound writer.

One of the reasons Spenser is such a great thinker (and this is also one of the reasons people enjoy C. S. Lewis) is his ability to make strange situations seem all too familiar. You are already familiar with “that type of love” or “that type of betrayal.” Indeed, in Lewis’s memorable description, Spenser’s first readers would have been like that “nervous child [who] heard tales of a panel slid back at twilight in a seeming innocent manor house to reveal the pale face and thin, black body of a Jesuit” (388). Speaking of influences, the previous quote suggests, not the Platonic academies, but the rustic country chapel. Spenser’s power is his ability to use “the popular symbols he found ready made to his hand” (390). Lewis rounds this chapter out with a careful discussion of certain motifs in Spenser.

Conclusion

This is not Lewis’s greatest work. Many of his references are unknown even to readers of British literature. Moreover, his thesis is not that clear at times. But for the serious student of Lewis, it is worth reading. Every page or so provides lucid commentary and instruction.

[Tommy Grooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

C.S. Lewis has said "in my own reading I always sacrifice critics to the poets, which is unkind to my own trade." I'm afraid my reading of The Allegory of Love sacrificed the poets for the sake of reading more Lewis. I was unfamiliar with most of the authors discussed and nearly all of their works, but hearing Lewis analyze this branch of literature was fascinating nonetheless. This is an academic work, and especially in the early chapters Lewis will frequently spout of passages and phrases in Greek and Latin that he doesn't bother to translate, but I never lost the thread of the literary narrative (which convincingly argues that medieval allegory was a forerunner to contemporary fantasy) and got to read a lot of Lewis' great peripheral pontifications on people and poetry.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though full of insight and truth, Lewis assumes more of his reader than I am able to produce: a familiarity with a wide variety medieval poetic literature; and fluency in Latin, Greek, French, Old and Middle English. Perhaps these obstacles should do for this old man what obstacles did for me as a boy: present a greater challenge to overcome. If only there were not so many more books to read.

[Lukerik · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The reader who has followed – if any has followed – my first two chapters…”

And I’m done. The problem here is accessibility. If you want to understand every word on the page in those first two chapters you will need to understand something like seven languages as he often quotes without translating. Particularly egregious is his use of Latin as he often slips in phrases or even makes his points in that language. This probably wasn’t such a problem back in 1936 as most of his audience would have learnt Latin at school. What this book needs is an annotated edition with translations in footnotes. If someone were to produce such a thing, I’d buy it because what I could understand was very good. He has a way of taking you into the Medieval mindset and making you look at our own times in a different way. If that sounds attractive read The Discarded Image which performs the same trick in English.

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that if you haven't read all the works the author is analyzing, it's going to be rather hard or tedious to follow at points. Yet, at least from the parts analyzing books that I'd actually read, it really is quite a good book--and it's neat to see Lewis as the literary critic, not simply as the theologian or novelist. While this book may have been longer than what I, as a layman to the field of Medieval studies, would have preferred, I gleaned a lot from it, and folks who have read more Medieval allegories than I have would certainly take a lot more from the book.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Good).

[Kyle McFerren · Rating 1 out of 5]

I absolutely love C.S. Lewis, otherwise I would never have picked up this book, but man was this ROUGH. Like seriously, unless you have a PhD in medieval literature or aspire to, this book is pretty incomprehensible. You should also probably be fluent in Latin, Greek, and Middle English (and French, German, and Old English for good measure) because there are extended passages without any translation in each language. The fact that I finished this book is a testament to my stubbornness.

If you are feeling pretty good about your intelligence and need a good dose of humility, though, maybe read a chapter or two of this.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is so fun to read C.S. Lewis’ medieval scholarship!

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very scholarly.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allegory and Courtly Love in Medieval Poetry

The Allegory of Love is a scholarly book, but I think it can be read with enjoyment by anyone interested in medieval poetry. The first two sections discuss of courtly love and allegory. These sections are primarily theory. If your main interest is the poetry, I believe they can be skipped with no diminution of understanding. Lewis, in fact, doesn't make use of them in much of his analysis of the poetry. The major area where he sticks close to them is in his analysis of the Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. Here understanding allegory is quite important although Lewis gives the relevant overview in his analysis of the poem.

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.

Some attributes of the book that will be hard for the general reader. Lewis uses Greek and Latin words in chapters one and two. He doesn't translate the words or all the passages he cites in Latin. He also uses the old English versions of the poems, which can take some thought to decipher. Still, I found the effort well worth it in understanding medieval poetry.

Although much of the writing is scholarly, Lewis' humor peeks through. I encourage you, if you're interested in medieval poetry, to not be put off by the scholarly. The analysis of the poems is extremely well done and well worth reading.

I reviewed this book for the Amazon Vine Program.

[Lynnette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent text book on medieval poetry as far as I can tell. This is the first book of that genre I have read. I was slightly annoyed that Lewis did not translate the old English, Latin, or French texts, but I suppose he was assuming that you have a base of those languages if you took an interest in medieval poetry. As hard as it was to get through this book because it was hard for someone of my ignorance to stay interested, the main concepts Lewis presents are brilliant and have inspired me to learn more about poetry. His explanation of the history of allegory was especially important. During the enlightenment mans’ thought process shifted from community to an awareness of self which meant that man now needed a way to express his inner thoughts in a tangible way. Allegory was used to take a feeling or part of oneself or someone else and give it flesh and a mouth and a brain so we could use it to reason and explore these emotions. The best example in the book is The Romance of the Rose. In it a man enters the court of love and decides to earn the rose (his love’s heart) by sort of journeying through the court and every person he encounters is part of his love that he must learn how to earn over. I think it was especially important to read this book because allegory is on the rise again but this time surfacing in rap and slam poetry.

[Dan Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are at all interested in medieval literature and its growth toward Elizabethan lit, you should get into this book immediately. I picked this up to help me with Edmund Spenser - following a binge in Ovid. What a discovery! This was serendipity.

It is an academic book written at a popular level, so understand that. Lewis has a monograph out there on the Elizabethans that is more serious and therefore harder to find and expensive. I will probably have to get into it after this sample of what his specialty in literature really was.

Ovid, Chretien de Troyes, Dante, Ariosto, Spenser... move a bit like this through some specimens of literature to understand the tradition he is describing and extolling.

Thanks to him, I have discovered Orlando Furioso and am nuts about it.

[Katharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating look at the historical development of both allegory as a poetic technique and the concept of “courtly love” into the western romantic tradition. Underneath that it is also a very interesting picture of how we have learned to study, express and understand our inner life, versus the very external focus of the ancient world. As a side bonus, it affords insight into what Lewis as a writer is responding to imaginatively in his own work, particularly his fiction.

The more familiar you are with classical and medieval literature, the more you’ll be able to get out of it. The major works/authors Lewis looks at here are the Romance of the Rose, Chaucer’s “Parlement of Fowles” and “Troilus & Cressida”, and Spenser’s Fairy Queene. Be prepared also to stop at least once a page for translation, unless you know your Greek, Latin, and Middle English :)

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis with his don hat again. Indeed, one of his earliest works.

Tracing some of the threads of allegory and courtly love through medieval history to the Renaissance. Heavy emphasis on the English part of the development. From Cretien's work to The Romance of the Rose through many English allegories to The Faerie Queen.

Interesting stuff. I would quibble about some points -- that there was, in the early days, so much argument that married couples could not love shows that many people disagreed with it -- but it's a good overview.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

To borrow a phrase from the master critic himself, "to praise it
would seem an impertinence" since I know nothing of criticism.
But despite the fact that I had read almost nothing that he writes about,
I was greatly benefited by reading this book. Lewis' style is always a
a strong corrective to ignorance and clumsiness on the one hand and
overwrought prolixity on the other. His thoughts edify like no
writer's I know. I can easily say of him (and this book in particular among
all his scholarly works) what he said of Spenser: that to read him is to grow
in mental health.

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written. What has C.S. Lewis ever written that wasn't great? For lovers of medieval literature and students of romance allegory it is a must-read. For anyone who wants to see another side of Lewis, his scholarship is much different from his theology and fantasy stories.

[John Minch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The allegory of love has expanded my approach to poetry and literature in general. Lewis begins by introducing and reinforcing the idea that "the romantic" is that which unites the conscious and unconscious mind. From this idea, Lewis introduces the two prime romantic structures: allegory, and symbolism. Allegory is the structure for representing what is immaterial (emotions, virtues, vices, etc.) in picturable terms. Symbolism, particularly religious symbolism, is an inversion of allegory that seeks to find the deeper realities that underlay the visible.

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. 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. What if we are living in an allegory made as a representation of a truer more permanent unseen/immaterial world. This seems to be the claim made in Hebrews 11:1-3 "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." (NIV). Tolkien's Mythopeia takes this concept a step further, suggesting that if we do in fact inhabit an allegory as living metaphors of an unseen reality then the heart of man would resonate with that truth in its longings and creative endeavors seeking to "dig the foreknown from experience and pan the vein of spirit out of sense" because we are patterned after a myth making creator and seek to return to the "single white" from which our "many hues" are splintered and "endlessly combine in living shapes that move from mind to 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. He explains it is realistic but not in a representative or illustrative sense, it contains characters that bear no resemblance to the sort of characters produced by this world and by virtue of this attribute are not relatable or empathy inspiring, but rather his characters, the world they inhabit, and the description of the events that occur therein produces in the reader a feeling that nearly approximates the feeling produced by living in the real world. 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. I call this amusing, because I am currently reading Anne of Green Gables where the protagonist - a romantically minded orphan child- chooses the Faerie Queen to memorize and quote a passage from as her contribution to a local talent show - a coincidence of parallel reading which seems to support Lewis's claim.

On the whole, I'm convinced - I plan to add Faerie Queen to my reading list, and count myself fortunate to have had the time and opportunity to read the Allegory of Love. Hopefully it will intensify my enjoyment of many future poems and stories.

[Hamster · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books comes across less like a work trying to prove a thesis than a book where Lewis finds an excuse to talk about as many (mostly obscure) medieval texts as he possibly can.
The result is a book that often feels disjointed and is full of digressions (also characteristic of most of the texts Lewis here discusses). It can also feel pointless, not just for the average person but even to the average scholar. Lewis offers a few great insights into the nature of writing and allegories here and there, but mostly he discusses what only the most committed of medievalists needs to know.
Once again, Lewis often includes other languages untranslated, making the book often difficult to understand. The appendices in particular are nearly incomprehensible.
And yet the scholarship here displayed is indeed remarkable. Lewis has indeed managed to change how I read, for example, The Faerie Queene. His insights are keen. Ultimately, I can't dislike a work this brilliant.