The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, published by Cambridge University Press in 1964, is Lewis's own synthesis, drawn from decades teaching medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge, of the model of the cosmos, nested planetary spheres, the Primum Mobile, the Empyrean beyond it and the music the spheres were held to make, that educated medieval Europe took as the shape of reality. Its strength is that Lewis reads that cosmology directly out of the literature it shaped, Dante, Chaucer and their contemporaries, rather than reconstructing it abstractly from philosophy alone, so the book shows the model doing the work it actually did in the poetry. Its limit is that Lewis was a literary scholar and Christian apologist writing a work of synthesis late in his career rather than presenting new archival research, so a claim resting on a specific primary medieval text is better checked against that text or a specialist study of it directly.