Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of Lille to Spenser The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Gorman, Sara Elizabeth. 2013. Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of Lille to Spenser. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11110435 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of Lille to Spenser A dissertation presented by Sara Elizabeth Gorman to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2013 ! © 2013 – Sara Elizabeth Gorman All rights reserved. ! Dissertation Advisor: Professor James Simpson Sara Elizabeth Gorman Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of Lille to Spenser Abstract This dissertation traces the progress of the personified imagination from the twelfth-century De planctu Naturae to the sixteenth-century Faerie Queene, arguing that the transformability of the personified imagination becomes a locus for questioning personification allegory across the entire period. The dissertation demonstrates how, even while the imagination seems to progress from a position of subordination to a position of dominance, certain features of the imagination’s unstable nature reappear repeatedly at every stage in this period’s development of the figure. Deep suspicion of the faculty remains a regular part of the imagination’s allegorical representation throughout these five centuries. Within the period, we witness the imagination trying to assert its allegorical position in the context of other, more established allegorical figures such as Reason and Nature. In this way, the history of the personification of the imagination is surprisingly continuous from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This “continuity” is not absolute but functions as a consistent recombination of a standard set of features of and attitudes toward imagination that rematerializes regularly. In order to understand this phenomenon at any point in these five centuries, it is essential to examine imagination across the entire period. In particular, the dissertation discovers an alternative, more nuanced view of the personified imagination than has thus far been posited. The """! ! imagination is a thoroughly ambivalent character, always on the cusp of transformation, and nearly always locked in a power struggle with other allegorical figures. At the same time, as the allegorical imagination repeatedly attempts to establish itself, it becomes a locus for intense questioning of the meaning and process of personification. The imagination remains transformative, uncertain, and at times terrifying throughout this entire period. "#! ! Table of Contents Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Imagination as Usurpation 20 Chapter 2: Protean Genius 61 Chapter 3: The Embodiment Crisis and the Irrational Imagination 118 Chapter 4: The Divided Imagination 158 Chapter 5: The Fragmented Imagination 194 Conclusion 237 Bibliography 240 #! ! Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would have been impossible without the help of a long list of advisors, mentors, institutions, and supportive friends and family members. It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge my committee chair, James Simpson, whose kindness, humanity, and encouragement always kept me going. James’ superior scholarship, sharp criticism, and endless knowledge have been invaluable. I am greatly indebted to my advisor, Nicholas Watson, whose incisive commentary kept me constantly on my toes, and who never let me stop until I had done my best work. I am deeply grateful to my third advisor, Jan Ziolkowski, for his careful readings, kind disposition, and constant support. I would like to thank the Huntington Library in California for providing me with funds to examine manuscripts in their collection and for supporting me while I completed the final stages of this dissertation. I am also indebted to the English department’s administrator, Gwen Urdang-Brown, for making my entire graduate school process run so smoothly. I would also like to acknowledge my compassionate colleagues and peers at Harvard, who offered support and friendship in the darkest days of dissertating. This dissertation would have been a mere dream without the love and support of my parents, Jack and Lauren, and my sister, Rachel. Thank you especially to my father, Jack, for being an endlessly valuable interlocutor and for tirelessly reading my entire dissertation. My deepest thanks to my soon-to-be husband, Robert Kohen, for his wonderful support and love and for being my most inspiring companion. #"! ! Abbreviations EEBO Early English Books Online MED The Electronic Edition of the Middle English Dictionary #""! ! Introduction Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. --Albert Einstein I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination. --John Keats The “imagination” as a creative entity has continuously been an object of fascination since the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics tried to codify its features and operation. As James Engell has pointed out, the idea was so fascinating that it developed simultaneously in various contexts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including religion, philosophy, criticism, literature, and science.1 Engell’s argument rightfully notes that the imagination as we understand it today was the creation of the eighteenth century.2 Despite the fact that Engell’s book was published in 1981, earlier iterations of the literary imagination have not been explored in the same depth as the Romantic imagination. Medieval scholars have not followed suit and investigated the literary development of the imagination in the medieval period. Although studies of the philosophical development of the imagination before and after the influx of Aristotelian texts into Western Europe abound, there are no in-depth analyses of the simultaneous evolution of the allegorical figure of Imagination in medieval literature. We are thus left !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), vii. 2 Ibid.! $! ! with a drastically incomplete literary history of the imagination, one that emphasizes uniformity between the Romantic period and our current understanding of the imagination but fails to delve back deeper into literary history to understand whether these ideas are continuous, fragmented, or somewhere in between. As Michelle Karnes has noted, there is no dearth of studies of the imagination, but most of them relegate the medieval imagination to a place of significant inferiority.3 The imagination, in these accounts, is triumphantly invented by Plato, elaborated upon by Aristotle, and then enters a “dark” period of feeble development until finally emerging as a prestigious agent of human creativity in the eighteenth century.4 These accounts display glaring inaccuracies and fail to recognize the reality of vivacious and often vicious debates about the imagination in the medieval period. In fact, there is certainly one way in which our modern conception of the imagination is closely related to the medieval conception: the medieval imagination was similarly a source of considerable mystery and fascination. Vibrant debate about the imagination was a regular part of philosophy and literature in the medieval and early modern periods, so ubiquitous in fact that it is surprising that there is not more scholarship on each and every aspect of the medieval imagination, including its literary development. This dissertation seeks to remedy in part this lack in the literary history of the imagination before the eighteenth century. The period from 1150 to 1590 begins and ends with strikingly similar challenges leveled at the imagination. In the twelfth century, Neoplatonic philosophy expresses suspicion of the imagination’s distortion of original truths. In the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1-2. 4 Ibid. %! ! sixteenth century, Reformation theology fears the imagination’s ability to proliferate false idols in the mind. Across the entire period, fear of the imagination is based on fundamental concerns about distortion of reality and the natural world. This fear takes on many different forms across the period, but it is always a strikingly present element of the allegorical representation of imagination. The flourishing of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries creates, on the surface, a more accommodating and less suspicious environment for the imagination. In these two centuries, the imagination develops with the most latitude, at times flouting Reason and demoting Nature. Yet within this imaginative freedom lurk concerns about the imagination’s power that become manifest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This dissertation