Robert Boenig - C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

2012 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012013500

ISBN 978-1-60635-114-7

Manufactured in the United State of America

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Boenig, Robert, 1948

C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages / Robert Boenig.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60635-114-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 18981963Criticism and interpretation.

2. Middle Ages in literature. I. Title.

PR 6023. E 926 Z 5864 2012

823.912dc23

2012013500

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

I owe thanks to the late Glen H. GoodKnight, past editor of the journal Mythlore, and to Janet Brennen Croft, its current editor, for graciously publishing the articles that, now revised, form the basis of ), part of its extensive section on Lewiss works, in my books first chapter. The C. S. Lewis Company has granted me permission to quote extensively from Lewiss works, a courtesy without which C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages would be filled with many assertions but with little proof. Specifically, those works, all by Lewis, and all under the copyright of C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., include The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Out of the Silent Planet, Surprised by Joy (for distribution outside the USA), Prince Caspian, The Great Divorce, Arthurian Torso, Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, God in the Dock, and the various articles quoted in this book. The English department of Texas A&M University generously supplied a grant to help with the costs of securing permissions.

Bruce L. Edwards and Don W. King, the readers for Kent State University Press, offered insightful suggestions, for which I am very grateful. I have learned much from reading their scholarship over the years, along with that of the many other Lewis scholars I reference in this book. I am, moreover, grateful for what I learned about Lewis through my conversations with three of my students at Texas A&M University: Nicole DuPlessis, whose 2001 MA thesis, (Super)Natural Worlds: Environmental Harmony and Societal Perfection in The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, written under my direction, opened my eyes to Lewiss significance as an environmental writer, and two former undergraduates, Amber Dunai and Kim Montoya, whose willingness to let me try out my ideas about Lewis in the context of independent study helped me greatly to refine them. My lifelong friend, the Rev. William David Spencer, Ranked Adjunct Professor of Theology and the Arts at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, first introduced me to Lewiss writings when we were undergraduates at Rutgers University in the late 1960s; that is only one of many things for which I am profoundly grateful to him. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife, Liz Boenig, whose goodness astonishes me daily, and it is to her that I dedicate this book.

The author and the publisher wish to thank the C. S. Lewis Company for permission to use extracts from the following works of C. S. Lewis:

Articles by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1950.

ARTHURIAN TORSO by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1948.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 2004, 2007.

GOD IN THE DOCK by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1970.

THE GREAT DIVORCE by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1946.

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1950.

MERE CHRISTIANITY by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1942, 1943, 1944, 1952.

MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1947, 1960.

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1938.

PRINCE CASPIAN by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1951.

SURPRISED BY JOY by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1955.

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by C. S. Lewis copyright C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1945.

On 28 April 1935, a thirty-six-year-old C. S. Lewis wrote a letter to his college friend Leo Baker, with whom he had for some years been out of touch. Baker, an actor and teacher who suffered from old war wounds, had first introduced Lewis to his great friend Owen Barfield. Now Baker had fallen ill, and Lewis wished to renew the contact, lest his friends illness prove life-threatening. As most of us would under similar circumstances, Lewis wanted to tell his friend what he had been doing over the intervening years since they last were in contact. This is how he did it:

You must not bother yourself with letter writing while you are unwell, nor need you: for I trust that any news of your state will trickle to me in the end by one channel or another. The last I heard from Barfield was a little more encouraging. Beyond wishing you well, I cannot enlarge on the subject: almost anything said from a well man to a sick man seems an impertinence.

My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.

Lewiss selection of things worthy to share with a long-lost friend is curious and invites some explanation. Baker had once been a frequent visitor to the household Lewis shared with Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureena mnage he The comment about his baldness acknowledges his entrance into middle age and perhaps paves the way for a face-to-face reunion with Baker in the future. The other salient fact Baker should know is certainly interesting, given the subject of this book, for Lewis here identifies himself as a medievalist.

When he had known Baker as an undergraduate, Lewis had been vacillating between the study of literature and of philosophy. His first efforts in procuring a fellowship had been in the direction of philosophy, but the one he secured was a one-year appointment, and when a permanent fellowship finally materialized, it was in English literature rather than philosophy. Academic appointments now, in the early twenty-first century, particularly in America, usually come with specialties attached, but this was not the case in English universities in the first half of the twentieth century. Lewis had been hired to tutor students in any phase of English literature covered by the Oxford syllabus, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that he would choose to specialize in the Middle Ages. But by 1935 his important article What Chaucer Really Did to