The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

C. S. Lewis's non-fiction would make a good set of feet for a Babylonian idol: It's part iron and part clay.

The iron in this book is one claim that deserves to be dinned into all modern artist's and writer's heads until they get it right: That original is not the same as good. Chaucer and Shakespeare didn't bother with inventing original plots; Chaucer used Boccaccio and folktales and fabliau and anything else that came to hand; Shakespeare used all sorts of things, including Chaucer. And so it went. To a medieval writer, what mattered was the telling, and its truth, and originality is for the people who can't tell the inside of their navels from the outside.

But Lewis has a bad tendency to snatch onto something he liked and then take it show more and run much, much too far with it. He did it with "courtly love" in The Allegory of Love, where he turned courtly love into a straw man; and he does it here with his "Mediaeval Model." It is, obviously, true that people in the Middle Ages saw the world differently, and they saw it as much more fixed than we do. But Lewis spends much, much, much too much time digging up relatively minor sources which support his prejudices, or late sources who did not have the influence of earlier authors like Aristotle or Boethius.

Perhaps I should give a disclaimer here: I'm trained as a scientist. Lewis despised science, and was so incompetent at mathematics that he couldn't pass the elementary school test the British universities administered; he only got into college because he was a World War I veteran and didn't have to pass the exams. But realize what this means: Lewis had no grasp of the modern, scientific model. None. No one who understands science could have written That Hideous Strength. So Lewis really is contrasting his "Medieval Model," which is the model he likes, with a scientific model that doesn't exist.

The result is short but rather prolix, and (to me) it fails utterly to prove its point. Yes, we need to understand that medieval writers saw the world differently. Yes, that model has value. (Compare the Gawain-poet's poetry to this modern stuff that has no rhyme, meter, alliteration, or point.) Yes, most of us think we understand that model, and don't. Yes, we need to be prepared to alter our own model. (That's the point of science, if Lewis had only known it.) These are all valid arguments. But all the pseudo-astrology, pseudo-alchemy, pseudo-logic? Chaucer knew better (see the Canon Yeoman's Tale). Lewis should have also.

[Correction January 17, 2018: Fixed subject/verb to concord in the second sentence.] show less

Lewis argues that Medieval people had a concept of the universe, a model, which they consciously built in text by referencing older books of any kind; in much the same way we have a scientific concept of the universe which we build by applying the findings of one arm of science to another. He teases this medieval conception out by analysing some late classical / early medieval books and then uses the model to throw light on others. An aesthetically very pleasing feedback loop, and probably one reason why the book in still in print.

It claims to be an introduction to Medieval literature, and so it is, but I suspect another reason for it’s popularity it that you get more out of it the more you already know. I’ve read a number of the show more books he discusses. If I hadn’t read Boethius I think I might have got a bit lost during his discussion of it.

Endlessly interesting and a very easy style. I don’t know if books about Medieval literature get much better than this.

One word of warning to Khoisan readers. Lewis has taken the unusual step of opening his book by making some racist comments about you, so gird your loins before you start. Once he gets it out of his system you’ll find little offend you beyond the lack of a bibliography. show less

The subtitle of this book is misleading in some respects. If you are not already well-versed in literature (not just medieval and Renaissance lit, but Hellenic antiquity as well), you might find yourself frustrated by Lewis's consistent references to items he believes should make up a core knowledge. That said, there is so much to be gained here and one should avoid distraction by getting too bogged down in the individual references. To do so is to miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Ultimately Lewis is building a case for a medieval model, and his epilogue addresses the complex and layered meaning behind that word. Ultimately he proposes more of a model-process: "The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence show more will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great." (222-23).

Somehow, Lewis manages to bring us from talk of angels and daemons (not always demons), to an investment in the exercises of the human soul, such as Intellectus and Ratio:

"We are enjoying intellectus when we 'just see' a self-evident truth. We are exercising ratio when we proceed step-by-step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply 'seen' would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel." (157).

It cannot be forgotten that Lewis was a literary scholar, a theologian, a poet, and himself a writer of science-fiction and fantasy. One gets the sense when reading Lewis, particularly in this book, that none of these are actually distinctively parsed for him. His acknowledgement and study of tropes seems to play out in real time, with statements that could be one or more layers of his intellectual onion. He critiques how we consider the past--as a 'costume play.' "This superficial (and often inaccurate) characterisation of different ages," he writes, " helps far more than we suspect towards ur later and subtler discriminations between them." (183). Indeed, I often remind my students (and myself) that history is more about patterns and tropes than pigeonholing figures, events, and art into narratively defined styles and genres.

The sum of the micro-literature reviews, the subtle 'digression' about digressions, and the encyclopaedic tone (something Lewis manages as an art), is an over-arching treatise on our human condition as it relates to literature (and art as a whole):

"Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud..." (214)

This book could be read in multiple ways. Perhaps when I have more time for curiosity, unhampered by the obligations of a career, I will sit again with this book and look up every treasure that Lewis cites. I will see the details of the collective contributions toward the medieval Model, and I suspect I will be richer for it. Lewis is not without his detractors, notably Philip Pullman (an author whose books I love), and others who have critiqued some of his works as sexist, and depictions in Narnia, in particular, as racist. Not having read any of those books since I was a child, I'm not equipped to comment on that at present, but I keep it in mind as I read Lewis's non-fiction works. show less

To me, this might be C. S. Lewis' best book. I will have to cop to not really liking the Narnia books (too allegorical and those British schoolchildren are pretty annoying), and while I do quite like his "Space Trilogy" I think that Lewis was much better as a writer of academic non-fiction than he was as a fiction writer. Here Lewis is able to tackle a huge subject: medieval cosmology and worldview, and bring both his wide reading and ability to make things understandable to the "common man" to the table.

In his emminently readable way Lewis starts by setting the stage, asking his audience (this was originally a series of lectures given to non-academics) to imagine a world according to the view proposed by the ancients and medievals. He show more also asks us not to judge this view, for many of its assumptions are no less strange than the ones we hold ourselves and our own belief that many of these ancients were foolish and superstitious, unable to distinguish between fact and metaphor in their depiction of the universe, is both pompous and mistaken.

We then move on to Lewis' discussion of the classical roots of medieval thought and belief, the hallowed place of the auctores in this conception, and the development of the medieval worldview with the melding of classical and Christian thought. We see the major figures taken as authorities and the views that came to be accepted regarding the universe and its inhabitants. The modes of medieval education are also covered, which help to delineate the subjects they thought most important and the major components that went to make these up.

Lewis always keeps things light and accessible, but has a breadth of knowledge and love for his subject that really shines through. I'd consider this book a great introduction to the thoughts and beliefs that the medievals had about their universe and then I;d move on the the "Space Trilogy" to see how Lewis incorporated these ideas into a science fiction tale that at least partially takes this cosmology as true as part of its basic premise. Great stuff.

(In some ways I'd see this as a good companion piece to E.M.W Tillyard's [b:The Elizabethan World Picture|590047|The Elizabethan World Picture|E.M.W. Tillyard|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320433482s/590047.jpg|576810]) show less

Poor old Lewis, as a product of his time and place, is probably more a victim of time warp than the Medieval writers he so admires. His expectation, despite this being an "introduction" according to his subtitle, is that his audience is utterly au fait not only with the entire canon of Chaucer and Dante and Boethius, but John Scotus and Gower and Langland and ... and so it goes on. He adopts an "as any fule kno" to and then cites these figures, or the prose (not poetry) of Donne, the depths of Milton ... added to that his era's ignorance of the implications of the once-generic "man" and the assumption that any abstract person (fule, too, I guess) can be represented by the masculine pronoun makes the read very unsatisfactory.

Still ... show more he does take me further into medieval literature than I have been for a long time, and for that and for his occasional pieces of playful dig at oxbridge friends and colleagues (Tolkien particularly) he deserves some kudos.

A classic of its time, but ... show less

Lewis is a timeless delight to read, as ever, but as I approach another round of studying the Medieval era with my students, I find this book particularly timely. From chapter one: “Nothing about a literature can be more essential than the language it uses. A language has it own personality; implies an outlook, reveals a mental activity, and has a resonance, not quite the same as those of any other.” Lewis goes on to examine the model that shaped the Medieval mind and therefore the literature and other writings of that period. I have already found this helpful while reading the venerable Bede with my book group and in thinking over works I have already read; I look forward to approaching this year’s homeschool reading list armed show more with the information from this book. show less

C S Lewis invents the idea of a medieval model to explain the medieval world view; just as in past ages men of learning have used models to understand the universe which they live. He may have used the title "The Discarded Image" because the medieval model has proved to be palpably not true. This however is not the point. Lewis contends that to understand medieval literature the modern reader must be familiar with their world view because it was the view that shaped their thoughts, lives and everything they wrote. The success of the book depends therefore on how well Lewis is able to explain and describe the model's essential elements.

Lewis introduces his subject by stating that medieval man built himself a model which explained the show more universe in which he lived and into which all his knowledge and learning could be included. Everything had to be fitted in. The middle ages are described as an age of acteurs(authority); all writers whenever they could based their knowledge on what had come down to them from past ages. It was an age of books and manuscripts which were pored over in order to find the necessary authority to shape their thoughts. This leads nicely into the next few chapters that identify and describe the sources that were used. Lewis starts with the classical aucteurs pointing out that the middle ages had less access to works from antiquity than we enjoy today. He then moves on to the seminal period: the period from the 3rd century AD to the 7th century AD where a pagan society became dominated by a western Christian society. He guides us through Plotinus; father of the neo-platonists to Calcidus, Macrobius, Dionysius and finally Boethius. Time is spent explaining their contribution to the medieval model and some important ideas emerge. The Christian society of the middle ages was based on a pagan view of the universe. It was Justin Martyr who had said earlier that: "Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to the Christians" Lewis also point s out that much of the writing was philosophical in nature it was not Christian doctrine. Lewis reminds us that Boethius was a Christian but it was a philosophy he was writing and so he had no hesitation in including pagan elements.

Having dealt with the sources for the model Lewis then sets out to to describe how it explains the workings of the cosmos. The earth is set at the centre with concentric circles radiating outwards from it. The circles immediately surrounding the earth are made up of the four elements; earth, air, fire and water. Then comes the great divide of the moon where air gives way to the ether. Lewis stresses it is important to understand that the circles above the moon containing the sun and the planets are translunary. These are the heavens; the realms of the angels and the gods and are incorruptible. The area below the moon is the sublunary where nature rules, there are deamons and the world is corruptible. Here Lewis could really use a diagram as it is difficult to understand the concepts from the text alone. Lewis emphasises that the heavens (translunary) were not conceived as the dark abyss of space, indeed they were full of light and the harmony of the spheres.

Lewis calls his next chapter "The Longaevi" these are the fairies that play significant parts in many medieval texts. Fairies consist of fauns, pans, satyrs silvans and nymphs and Lewis admits that they remain elusive, but need some interpretation for the modern reader. The following longer chapter "Earth and its Inhabitants" covers most other fields of knowledge. There is; the human rational soul, the human body and its humours, the human past and the teaching of the liberal arts. Finally we come to "The Influence of the Model" where Lewis explains how the model he has described effected the literature produced in the middle ages and beyond. Interesting points arise here especially for those readers who have issues with some aspects of medieval literature. For example why does it contain so many lists and catalogues, which merely serve to make a dull read and why do writers continually use source material rather than inventing their own stories. Lewis is able to answer these questions by referring to the evidence that he has provided in his explanation of the medieval model.

The books undertitle: "an introduction to Medieval and Renaissance literature is misleading on two counts. Firstly it is so much more than an introduction; it is a text that does no less than tease out the key points to enable the modern reader to understand medieval literature from the perspective of those who wrote it. Lewis's use of the model brilliantly captures the world view of the middle ages and his comparisons with the modern age are enlightening. Secondly I think more would be gained from reading this book after some familiarisation with medieval texts. Coming to the book with no such experience would make in my view some of the more abstract arguments difficult to follow.

There are a couple of criticisms. There is no list of reference material at the back of the book. Medieval literature is referenced within the text itself with perhaps an over reliance on Chaucer, but it would have been useful to have these collected somewhere. There are no diagrams and some of Lewis's explanation cry out for them. These can be forgiven because for me the book produced some light bulb moments. It is an essential read for anybody with more than a passing interest in medieval literature show less