Daniel Wright’s Reviews > The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition > Status Update

In many periods the historian of literature discovers a dominant literary form... it must be noticed that such dominance is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.

[Augustine] comments on the fact - to him, apparently, remarkable - that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth of a new world. Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even 'reading' (in our sense) did not yet exist [cont[

These phantom periods for which the historian searches in vain - the Rome and Greece that the middle ages believed in, the British past of Malory and Spenser, the Middle Age itself as it was conceived by the romantic revival - all these have their place in a history more momentous than that which commonly bears the name.