Boccaccio, a lesser name than Petrarch or Dante, but on myn auctor, Lollius.The
name ofLollius is to be found in the first line of an Epistle by the Roman poet
Horace: ‘troiani belli scriptorem, maxime lolli, ... relegi’. Horace was writing to Lollius
Maximus that he had been reading the writer on Troy, that is, Homer. This was
misunderstood as: ‘I have read Lollius again, the greatest writer on the Trojan War
... ’. Lollius is named as the authority on Troy by the 12th-century philosopher John
of Salisbury, a pupil of Abelard and a witness of Becket’s murder.
Another aspect of medieval literary thought is allegory, the making out of deeper
meanings below the surface of literature or of life, meanings of a moral or spiritual
sort. Allegory developed from the Hebrew and Christian use of biblical prophecy as
the key to events. Allegory is a function of the principle of analogy, the correspon-
dence of physical and spiritual in a universe which was a set of concentric spheres
with the earth at the centre. Hell was inside the earth, heaven above it. In the hierar-
chy of creation, man was at a midpoint between angels and animals. Allegory could
be expressed in composition or in interpretation. Dante set out a scheme of the four
kinds of meaning to be found in a text. Allegorists followed Augustine’s principle
that all that is written is written for our doctrine (taken from St Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans 15:4). This agreed with the often-cited classical maxim that literature
should teach and delight. Classical ideas persisted strongly in the Middle Ages, often
in unclassical forms: one significant survival was the classifying of literature as
composition, a branch of Rhetoric, originally the art of public speaking.
Such academic attitudes inspired clerical literature, as in The Owl and the
Nightingale (early 13th century), a debate between two birds, a wise Owl and a pleas-
ure-loving Nightingale, dusty Wisdom and appealing Song. That youth and age are
often at debaat was proverbial, but debaat was sharpened by the rise of universities
with few master s and many students. In The Owl,Latin academic debate is refreshed
by the beast-fable form and English idiom. The birds’ spirited quarrel becomes
philosophical; all that they can agree on is an arbitrator for their dispute, one
Nicholas of Guildfor d. They fly to Portisham, Dorset, to see this clerk; but here the
author breaks off, saying that he cannot tell how their case went. He leaves us to
decide between owl and nightingale.Lyrics
The nightingale had become the bird of love in Provençal lyrics of the early 12th
century. In these first lyrics of courtly love, the service due to a feudal lord was trans-
fe rred to a lady. Whatever the relation of this literary cult to real-life wooing, it is not
found in classical literature. The refinement and abundance of Provençal song-liter-
ature is unmatched in North French and English lyric. Yet the love-song of birds
ec hoes clearly in the lyrics of the early 14th-century Harley manuscript. ‘Alysoun’
opens:
Bitwene March and Averil,
When spray beginneth to springe,
The litel foul hath hire wil, bird
On hyr e lede to synge. her language
I live in love-longinge,
For semeliest of alle thynge,
She may me blisse bringe,
Ich am in hire baundoun. control46 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500