The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

For their system is in one sense more heliocentric than ours. The sun illuminates the whole universe.

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.

The nearest we get to a widespread ‘philosophy of history’ in the Middle Ages is, as I have said, the frequent assertion that things were once better than they are now.

Poets and other artists depicted these things because their minds loved to dwell on them. Other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination.

Between Chaucer’s time and his the arts had become conscious of what is now regarded as their true status. Since his time they have become even more so. One almost foresees the day when they may be conscious of little else.

And yet, pleads Boethius, it is very strange to see the wicked flourishing and the virtuous afflicted. Why, yes, replies Philosophia; everything is strange until you know the cause.105 Compare the Squire’s Tale (F 258). (2)

He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

The mass media which have in our time created a popular scientism, a caricature of the true sciences, did not then exist. The ignorant were more aware of their ignorance then than now.

One is tempted to say that almost the typical activity of the medieval author consists in touching up something that was already there;