Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum; nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis, nostri status, nostrae sortis fidele signaculum. (Alan of Lille, ed. Raby 1959 : 369) [All creation, like a book or a picture, is a mirror to us – a true figure of our life, our death, our condition, our lot.] To the medieval mind symbolic significance might be read into almost anything, when all creation was a mirror, figure and script that pointed beyond itself, reminding of an otherworldly dimension that offered the only true and abiding perspective. In the variety of his works the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson can represent – by way of introduction to this chapter – the sheer range of uses of signs and symbols in medieval writings. His Garmont of Gud Ladeis reads moral conduct in terms of the symbolism of female attire, and in his Testament of Cresseid the disfiguring leprosy that punishes Cresseid for defiance of the gods draws on traditions that see sickness as an outward sign of inner moral condition. In his Orpheus and Eurydice Henryson plays his own variations on medieval traditions of moralizing classical mythology to expound a Christian moral. Here the hero and heroine symbolize intellect and desire respectively: when Eurydice flees through a May meadow from a would-be rapist shepherd, is stung by a venomous serpent and is summoned to hell, ... log in or subscribe to read full text