Imagination from Alan of Lille to Spenser The Harvard community has made this article openly ...

262 Pages·2013·1.2 MB·English

by  Sara Gorman

Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of
Lille to Spenser
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Gorman, Sara Elizabeth. 2013. Transformative Allegory: Imagination from Alan of Lille to
Spenser. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
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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

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© 2013 – Sara Elizabeth Gorman
All rights reserved.

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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
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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.

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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

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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.

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Abbreviations
EEBO Early English Books Online
MED The Electronic Edition of the Middle English Dictionary

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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
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1 James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981), vii.

2 Ibid.!
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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
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3 Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1-2.

4 Ibid.
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