C.S. Lewis as Medievalist

Abstract

Abstract C.S. Lewis’s life as an academic was concerned with the teaching of medieval and Renaissance literature, though both his lectures and his publications also incorporated his extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin classics. He argued that the cultural and intellectual history of Europe was divided into three main periods, the pre-Christian, the Christian and the post-Christian, which he treated as a matter of historical understanding and with no aim at proselytization: a position that none the less aroused some opposition following his inaugural lecture as professor at Cambridge. Ever since his childhood, his interest in the Middle Ages had been an imaginative rather than a purely scholarly one, and his main concern was to inculcate a sense of the beauty of that pre-modern thought world and its value-a concern that set him apart from the other schools of English language and literature dominant in his lifetime.

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