Diane Speed on “Lewis and Allegory”
On Friday 5 May at Lewis for Scholars, Dr Diane Speed, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney, gave a paper on Lewis and Allegory. We are pleased to be able to reproduce it here as a free download from the conference:
In my own student days, The Allegory of Love was a major item on our reading lists for medieval literature, and we devoured with wonder the wealth of learning, so integrated and worn so lightly, presented between the covers. In the 21st century, it is still highly recommended reading in certain of my own classes, and not just as a classic reference. Individual points of arguments have been taken up and even refuted with some force. Scholars have, in varying degrees, taken the exegesis of the individual literary texts the book investigates further, and laid the grids of modern textual theories across them. But The Allegory of Love is arguably unmatched in its magisterial treatment of a millennium of texts and their broader intellectual implications, and it certainly cannot remain other than seminal in a major field of scholarly endeavour.
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