The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory: (periods of European Literature, Vol. II)

This is the story of European literature finding its modern voice. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, writers abandoned Latin and began telling stories in the languages people actually spoke, French, Provençal, English. The result was a literary revolution: chivalric romances of knights and courts, allegories that dressed ideas in narrative clothing, and the birth of vernacular storytelling traditions that would shape Western literature for centuries. George Saintsbury traces this transformation with the keen eye of a scholar who understands that literature does not evolve in isolation. Here is the emergence of courtly love, the Matter of Britain and France, the elaborate dreaming poems and narrative frameworks that influenced everything from Spenser to Romanticism. Saintsbury argues passionately that the vernacular was not merely a curiosity but the true heartbeat of medieval literary culture, far livelier than the Latin tradition that dominated academic study. For anyone curious about where our modern literary imagination truly began, this volume offers a guided tour through the workshops where romance and allegory were being forged into something new.